


The Lionheart

by damalur



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-04
Updated: 2012-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-15 14:35:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 46,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/528347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/pseuds/damalur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every town needs a librarian.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Lionheart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First season AU; props to Robin McKinley for a concept regarding gardening and many thanks to Odyle for her services as a first reader and life coach.

There was in Henry's book an appendix that served as a compendium of fairy tale characters. It was particularly valuable when Henry ran across a person who appeared in Snow White's story only briefly before spinning off to have his or her own adventures on other pages; when Henry came to a character he didn't recognize, he would mark his place with a finger and turn to the back. The third appendix often raised more questions than it answered, and whoever had written his book understood organization only in the loosest sense of the term, but Henry had a knack for finding lost things, and he liked the parenthetical notes. Even so, it took him half an hour to find Beauty's entry, which the author had listed under "L", not "B".

Beauty's entry read:

_T HE LIONHEART_

_Born in Avonlea, daughter of Lord Maurice, himself a vassal of George the Broker King. Her banner is a gold lion wreathed in roses and rampant on a field of crimson. The Lionheart ended the Third Ogre War (cf. Succession War, p. 67; _The War of Ogre Aggression_ , Oakeshotte & Co.) by binding herself to the Dark One (here, the Spinner). Renowned for her courage and skill as a leader, the Lionheart had the gift of tongues and was said to keep a dragon chained at her side._

Here there was a faint note in crooked handwriting: _IMPOSSIBLE. The suggested timeline renders this highly unlikely; dragons had all but died out by the 3100s thanks to aggressive hunting. George slaughtered the last of the Black Dragons on the fields of East-at-Dawns four decades before the Third Ogre War, although if the Lionheart was keeping a pet, it would have to be a wyvern, not a true dragon. Anyway, she was no warrior; how would she have captured a dragon???_

The text continued:

_In 3134 she clashed with the Sorceress of Charn and vanished shortly thereafter. The people of the new world occasionally give her name to bravest rulers (cf. Richard the Lionheart) to do her honor, although she is little remembered outside of the fairy story "The Beauty and the Beast."_

_The Lionheart is, however, only a legend; and all legends are given to exaggeration._

The last line struck Henry as strange, because of _course_ the Lionheart was a legend. That didn't make her any less real. His book's author didn't do a very good job of being objective; sometimes the author's opinions were nearly violent, and while he took some tales as absolute truth, others he dismissed with a few lines or shuffled off to the back all together. (That was the second appendix; the first appendix was mostly maps. Henry hadn't figured out the fourth appendix yet, since those pages were blank, but he was hoping Emma would have an idea. Emma probably knew all about invisible ink; that was the kind of thing you learned about in prison.) 

He wasn't exactly sure who the Lionheart was, but he thought she might be Issy French, the town librarian. Issy was brave—she'd stood up to his mom when his mom tried to explain away the basement rooms in the hospital, the ones that didn't appear on any blueprint—and she was clever—she could speak three languages, and she could read four or five books in one day, and she'd explained algebraic variables to Henry so he'd understood—and sometimes, when she combed out her braid, her hair looked like a lion's mane, fierce around her face.

When he found Avonlea in the first appendix, the miniature ink drawing of the castle that marked the seaside town had roses at the base. The only other place that had roses was the Dark Castle, which the first appendix called something different. Henry decided that the roses marked places important to Beauty, and Moe French sold roses. Issy had to be the Lionheart.

He didn't know who the Beast was, which bothered him, but it didn't seem like the sort of thing he could figure out on his own. The book implied that the Beast—or the Dark One, or the Spinner, or Rumpelstiltskin; it must be confusing, to have that many names—had been the one to craft the Evil Queen's curse. If Henry had made a curse, he wouldn't want people to know he'd had anything to do with it. Rumpelstiltskin probably felt the same way, although for different reasons.

-

The library was in need of better funding. In point of fact, the library was perpetually in need of, and Belle was tired of the hours she spent wrestling with the budget just to afford lights and books. She did the cleaning herself, but Storybrooke's library was not large, and she had to pay handsomely for interlibrary loan services. Budgeting was one of the very few things she disliked about her job.

She could, of course, approach the town's wealthier citizens in hope of a donation, but unfortunately the town's wealthier citizens were the Mayor and the local pawnbroker. Belle wouldn't approach Regina without very good cause, unless she was desperate or had some idea that she could leave the encounter victorious. She doubted the Mayor would donate anything, although her son used the library's services often and enthusiastically.

There was Mr. Gold, but—

Belle was only four months escaped from the hospital's basement, and while Dr. Hopper had assured her that she was fit to return to work, she'd had to fight to get her old job back. Even her credentials hadn't been enough to convince the City Council that she was qualified to resume her post; Agatha Schwarzwald had tried to smear her name by pointing out that Belle was not only in poor mental health but that her MLS came from online courses. Belle had won that battle through sheer tenacity. She kept turning up in the Council meeting room until the constituents were, quite literally, sick of her face.

And he didn't remember. There was only so much her heart could withstand, and seeing Rumpelstiltskin sewn into the skin of another man—an awful, horrible, beastly man—was more than it could take.

Some days she was sure she was half-mad herself. Memories of two lives were stitched together piecemeal in her head, and she had no proof other than trust in her own resilience. No, better to avoid him altogether than to risk provoking some sleeping dragon lurking in his mind or hers. She wasn't even sure what she could say to him, so far out of her sphere of existence did he seem. And if she wasn't happy, her conditions had improved in the past year. Not so long ago she'd woken every morning with no memory other than that of a while cell. She hadn't known who she was, or where she'd come from; she hadn't known her _name_. That white room had contained the entire universe, and the entire universe was a poor thing, with one living resident, a bucket, a showerhead, a small bar of soap, a toilet, a bench, and a window too dirty to offer a view. There were three people who visited the universe—the nurse, who brought a tray of food twice a day, and the man who cleaned her cell, and the Mayor, who seemed content to gloat over Belle's continued existence. That was her life; that had always been her life, and until her door swung open one day in May Belle had seen no evidence to suggest that her life would continue any differently until she died or truly did go mad.

She remembered some things—concepts, like light and food, and the basics of how to care for herself, and little more than that. The shower was a weekly luxury. She was given a blanket in winter, and that itself was more variety than she'd learned to expect. Her first weeks in the outside world were overwhelming, a riot of color and noise and technology that didn't make sense, no matter that she had memories of driving a car, of using a computer.

She'd lived with her father for two months, but the day after she paid her father's bills, driven herself to the grocery stores, paid with a credit card, and returned home without the slightest tinge of hesitation or doubt, she'd moved back into her old apartment. The landlord had left it entirely as it had been; her books were still shelved in the same haphazard order, her sheets were still turned back on the bed; the food had been cleaned out of her refrigerator, but that was the only change she'd found.

Of course, she'd only been gone fourteen months—

Funny, how it seemed like longer.

Her landlord was Mr. Gold, of course. Her heart had leapt to her throat when she'd seen her rooms unchanged—good business practices dictated that an apartment not stand empty—but then he'd sent someone around for the rent three days before it was due. It shouldn't make any difference to him that she was tired and frightened and still unsteady in crowds, not when she was nothing to him, not when the second set of memories said that he was nothing to her. 

Belle had learned not to mind the second set of memories. 

Anyway. The problem with being a librarian ( _the_ librarian) in a small town was that she wasn't a many-handed millionaire. Mary Margaret was a godsend; she stopped by once or twice a week to sit at the front desk while Belle ran programs and reshelved what couldn't wait until after-hours. Sometimes Mary Margaret herself would plan events for the younger activity group: hour-long blocks spent molding Play-Doh or reading storybooks. Belle didn't have the money to pay her, which felt wretched, but Mary Margaret never seemed bothered in the least. In fact, she often seemed grateful for the escape.

The library wasn't busy, at least, although she'd been nurturing a growing group of singles and families who turned up in the evenings. The hours were dictated by Belle's availability, so she made herself available as often as possible, eating her meals behind the front desk. Granny started stopping by in the afternoon; she liked murder mysteries, mostly, Sue Grafton and Agatha Christie and Anne Perry at the holidays. Ruby liked thrillers and, Belle suspected, checked out thick Harlequin paperbacks only to keep up appearances. Leroy read poetry. There'd been some chatter about starting a knitting group; Belle had blocked off the meeting room from six to eight on Thursdays in case Sister Astrid ever got around to organizing it.

It was late September when Emma called her about the guns. Belle took one of her rare long lunch hours, leaving a scribbled _out to lunch—back at one_ note taped to the doors before walking down to the police station. The stroll was short. Some days it seemed like every place in Storybrooke was a leisurely fifteen minutes from every other place, and although Belle knew from experience that wasn't so, there was something quite literally magically about the town's compressed distances and hidden turns. 

Emma was waiting at her desk with a bag of take-out, probably soup from Granny's. 

"You have it?" Belle said.

"Do I ever," Emma said, and grinned as she passed over the paper container of cream-of-tomato.

"And you don't mind me borrowing it? You're sure? I can't guarantee one of the kids won't trip and break something."

"I wouldn't have offered if I minded," Emma said. "And it's no fun with just me and Henry. I bought the damn set to enjoy with him, but laser tag's no fun with two people."

"I thought we could dim the lights and play in the stacks. You're invited, of course! I didn't think—"

"You," Emma said, and pointed her spoon at Belle, "you just want another adult around."

"Caught." Belle picked out another piece of onion and set it on her napkin. "It seems that all the parents are finally figuring out that there's a free service that will take their kids for a couple of hours every Friday night. Last week I had thirteen of them playing some video game I didn't understand. I had to have Ava set it up. We didn't even have enough computers."

"LAN party, yeah, Henry told me about that. Want your onions?"

"No, although it's disgusting that you want anything someone else digs out of their soup," Belle said, but she pushed the napkin across the table obligingly. "Regina's been letting you seen Henry more."

"Sure has," Emma said. "I think we've both kind of halfway called a truce. Blame the kid; it's impossible to say no to him when he turns on the kicked puppy eyes."

Belle snorted. "I don't imagine he has to even go that far. He has you wrapped around his little finger, admit it."

"Yeah, well. Any time he's away from Regina is time well spent in my book. She probably thinks of me as free babysitting." Emma shrugged. "Whatever."

"I doubt she thinks of you as anything that innocuous," Belle said, and her mind called up the image of a woman in black on a lonely road. Her hair was black, and her dress, and the carriage she rode in was black, but her lips were red as rubies, and from them spilled a truth so sweet it sounded like a lie.

"You really don't like her, huh?"

"I don't like to speak ill of anyone," Belle said, which was ridiculous, but she knew better than to publicly set herself against the queen.

(The thought rose unbidden: _Yet._ )

"Sell me a new one, sister," Emma said. 

"You could've brought the toys by yourself instead of making me close up at lunch."

"Nice. Change the subject."

"I'm not—"

Emma popped the lid back on her soup cup, slouched back, and kicked her feet up on the desk; Belle, half meanly and half in amusement, thought that the Sheriff sat that way purely for effect. Emma had _such_ a swagger. Belle had to wonder who her parents were, to pass along such a remarkable set of characteristics and yet still have enough poorness of feeling to abandon their daughter on the side of a road.

"You need to get out more, Issy. Ten-hour days, seriously? Do you ever take a day off?"

"I close early on Sundays."

"Uh-huh."

"I like the work," Belle said firmly. "I'm paid to play laser tag, Emma, you can't tell me that qualifies as grueling."

"Come out with us," Emma said. "Ruby's planning another girls' night out on Saturday, and I'm sorry, but I am not going to suffer alone through that another evening of Ashley and Mary Margaret whispering over their drinks while Ruby pretends she isn't a predator."

"You come to the library," Belle said. "We can test out the laser set."

Emma blinked. "Yeah?"

"Bring Henry. It'll be fun. I'll lock up at five, so anytime you want to come by after that..."

"Date," Emma said. "I'll drop the kid off after and we can watch a movie or something."

"I'll bring ice cream."

"You do that. I'll bring beer."

"Sounds perfect. Thanks again for lunch, even if you did lure me out of work with false promises."

"No big," Emma said. "See you later!"

"Not if I see you first!" Belle called.

Thirty seconds later she was back in the sheriff's office.

"Forgot the guns, huh?" 

"Oh, shut up," Belle said, but she smiled at Emma as she resettled her purse on her shoulder and hefted the box of toys.

The walk back to work took considerably more time when one was carrying a small fortune's worth of electronics; Belle tripped twice, first on the police station steps and then again outside of the City Hall. The second time was disastrous, and as she saw the pavement rushing at her face, she only had the time to think about how unfortunate it was that grace was not among her virtues.

And then someone caught her.

"Careful, dear," her rescuer said. "There are some in this town who won't take kindly to a stranger falling all over them."

"Oh," Belle said, and then, "But we aren't strangers."

Mr. Gold looked at her askance, but he didn't let go of her arm.

"You're my landlord," Belle said.

She hadn't realized that he was tense until something thunderous left his gaze. "Ah, yeah. The librarian. Shouldn't you be at work?"

"I'm on my way back." He was very close. Close enough that she could feel his breath on her face; close enough that he could almost certainly feel hers. Belle tried to keep her eyes from drifting to his lips and failed utterly. "What are you doing here?"

Too familiar, but he gave no sign of having noticed. "Business. With the mayor. She's a...particular friend of mine." He smirked, the expression inward and private and not at all what she wanted to see. 

"Right," Belle said, and pulled her arm out of his grasp. "Then I shouldn't keep you. Thanks for the assistance."

"Watch where you're going next time."

"I didn't ask you to save me," she snapped, and pushed past him. She was angry enough that, had she not still been clutching the cardboard box, her hands would've been shaking visibly. It took every ounce of control she possessed to not surrender to her curiosity and that other, deeper feeling and look back, but she did not.

She missed that he did.

-

Belle lived in a four-room apartment above Standard Clocks. Mr. Gold owned the building, much as he owned the block, much as he owned the town, but her rent was fair enough provided she paid on time. She'd lived there for six years now, since moving out of her first starter apartment down by the wharf, and while it was small enough that she frequently knocked her elbow against the wall getting out of bed, she liked the location and the view.

Her bedroom and the living room were lined with shelves, the cheap particle board kind that was never entirely free of dust. She had a better quality bookcase crammed in the bathroom—Emma liked to tease her about that—and some packing crates in the kitchen, and even still she had to stack her overflow in with the dishes. She didn't have many of those; three of her four original plates had been lost to fits of clumsiness. There was enough room in the kitchen for a card table and two chairs, and the crates, of course, and a pot of roses at the far left of the narrow windowseat. That had been a housewarming gift from her dad, the second time she'd moved out, a miniature pink rose bush in a cheery blue-and-white striped ceramic pot. He wasn't the best at giving gifts, Dad, since he tended to turn red and start stammering if he'd put any real feeling into picking out the present, and since he had to fight against poorly-concealed embarrassment at what meagre offerings he could afford, but Belle would rather have that flower than any fancy jewelry or vacation.

Her bedroom was smaller still, with only enough room to walk three paces from the single bed to the window. She'd painted it green and put up soft pink curtains, thinking to imitate the flower in the kitchen; the closet doors never quite closed, so she'd taken them down completely and stored them in the basement below the clock shop. The bedroom was for fiction, poetry, fairy tales, and children's literature—all the books she didn't want to explain to visitors.

The living room was a deep maroon color that predated her arrival. Belle had hated it on sight, but she'd grown to appreciate the way the rich color looked in dim lighting, and anyway most of the wall was hidden behind cases. 

There was also a fireplace.

She'd positioned her armchair next to it, and a small television in the opposite corner (on the shelf between Astronomy and Mystery [A-L]), and put down a rug for company and nights when she lit the fire. There wasn't space enough for a sofa, and she didn't have many visitors other than Emma and sometimes Henry or Mary Margaret, all of whom were perfectly content to throw themselves down on the floor. Belle did feel odd about telling Mary Margaret to sit on the rug, although it wasn't a sentiment she could explain, and so almost always offered Mary Margaret the armchair, which Mary Margaret almost always refused.

On Saturday Belle locked up the library at four and walked home to eat before Henry and Emma came knocking. She thought, briefly, about bringing the umbrella that she'd stashed behind the circulation desk with her; clouds were gathering to the east, far out to sea; but a little water had never hurt anyway, and her bag was canvas and waterproofed. For dinner she had leftover cucumber bisque and cornbread, which she ate cross-legged on the windowseat with a copy of _Foccault's Pendulum_ propped up against the flowerpot. At half past five she rinsed her dishes, collected her canvas bag, and set out for work, taking care to lock her door behind her. She'd forgotten to do so twice in the past month, and although no terrible consequences had ensued, she'd been startled both times by the idea that someone could have intruded on her sanctuary without her knowledge or permission.

Emma must have been delayed at the station, because she wasn't waiting when Belle returned, but Emma was never more than fifteen minutes late without calling, so Belle let herself back in and went to empty the bookdrop. Someone had left her the gift of five large-print copies of Reader's Digest. Again. The mailing addresses were cut from the covers, her benefactor apparently content to let the generosity of their gift go unrewarded. Some days she felt like posting a sign on the building forbidding donations all together.

She was pulled out of her thoughts by a knock—not Emma's playful tapping, but a series of crisp, firm raps that put her in the mind of business suits and appropriate handshakes. Belle fumbled for the keys, found them half-hidden under a cascade of DVDs, and tripped her way around to the front.

Business suits; appropriate handshake; here was a woman who likely ordered custom calling cards and returned them if her name wasn't printed in the perfect ten-point sans-serif font, the delineation between ink and paper sharp enough to cut. Regina was at the door.

Belle almost dropped the keys and at the last second clenched her hands. She would not reveal even that much weakness, not here, not now, and not to this woman.

"Mayor Mills," she said, and if she'd had the ability to feel pleasure around her deep-rooted panic, she would've been pleased at how cool her voice sounded. "Is there something I can do for you?"

"Mmm, what a lovely offer," the Mayor said, "but no, dear, thank you"—Belle's skin crawled as if someone had upended a jar of spiders over her head—"I'm here to drop off my son. Has Sheriff Swan arrived?"

Belle hadn't noticed Henry, but he was there, to the side of the walk, hunched away from his mother as he pretended to examine the dirt-filled urn next to the bookdrop slot. Belle would've planted mums in it if she'd had the funding. 

"Emma's on her way," Belle lied. "Would you like to come in...?" She couldn't quite make herself step away from the entrance; her arm, holding open the door, prevented Regina from entering, but if the Mayor accepted her invitation she would have to—Belle would have to—

"No, thank you. Henry?"

"Mom?" 

"You'll wait here with Miss French. I don't want you running off to look for that woman on your own. Home by eight-thirty or I'm grounding you again, is that clear?"

"Yes," Henry said. It was painful to watch; he was normally so—so present, and enthusiastic, and undaunted, but under the Mayor's iron gaze Henry positively wilted.

"Yes what?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well, then." The Mayor looked at her son. Belle wondered if she would stoop to hug him, but instead Regina pressed her hand to his shoulder. "Have fun."

"Thanks, Mom!" Henry chirped, and then he ducked under Belle's arm. He was back almost immediately, having dropped his backpack inside the door. "Can I help empty the bookdrop?"

"Truck's inside, but—Henry!" Belle almost laughed at his enthusiasm and then had to bite her lip; she felt trapped in that doorway, between the familiar comfort within and the bleak winter personified without. "Check the movies for missing discs!"

"Got it!"

Regina had crossed her arms, almost like she was trying to wall herself away from her son's brightness. She really was an astonishingly beautiful woman, Belle thought, but no one who looked twice into her bottomless dark eyes could ever think her kind.

"Tell the Sheriff about his curfew. Please," the Mayor said. 

"Yes," Belle said.

Something in the Mayor's regard shifted, and now Belle felt herself pinned by the attention. "You can reach me at my cellphone if there's any problem. I'll be out until later in the evening, so make sure Sheriff Swan understands not to drop him home early."

"Business?"

"And pleasure," the Mayor said, and bared her teeth. "I have an appointment in town. At the Pawn Shop."

Belle understood the sudden interest now, but she gave away no sign of hurt. "I'll pass it along. Good evening, Mayor."

That beast's snarl gave way to a satisfied smirk: a cat licking cream or something bloodier from her chops. "Good evening, Miss French."

Belle watched her march to her car and drive away without relief. She couldn't describe the cocktail of emotions the Mayor awakened in her; there was fear, undoubtedly, although Belle had never given much weight to fear; and there was a trembling anxiety that was little more than a base, human panic at the thought of being lock away again; there was pity, too, although less of it than there had been once upon a time; but beneath it all, Belle suspected she harbored an abiding rage.

Emma came rushing up seconds after the Mayor's car disappeared from sight. She was breathing hard and still had her badge clipped to her belt; it was a wonder she could run in those ridiculous tall boots she liked, even flat-soled as they were. "Iz! You okay? I saw her—"

"I'm fine," Belle said. "I'm—perfectly fine."

"Yeah? Sorry, I should've warned you that she was going to drop Henry off. Not nice to inflict her on people without warning."

"No, it isn't, but lucky for you I'm feeling generous." Emma's crestfallen expression brightened a little, and then further when Belle added, "Your son's inside." The familial term was deliberate.

"Great. Sure you're okay?" Emma edged her way inside, and unlike earlier, Belle was perfectly willing to give ground.

"Emma. When I say I'm fine, I mean it."

"Got it—don't doubt the lady in charge or she might put you in time-out."

"Sheriff," Belle said. "If I ever put you in time-out, it's because you deserved it. Now go find Henry. He has to be home by 8:30, which gives you less than three hours."

Emma grinned. "Time-out. Hah. Like you could.

"I couldn't—" Belle smiled sweetly. "But Mary Margaret could."

"You're wicked."

"Not evil?"

"Nah, I think we both know there's only room for one evil woman in this town." Emma pulled a complicated face and topped it off by rolling her eyes. "Kid? Kid!"

Henry popped around the corner, carrying a stack of books so tall it hid his face entirely. "Emma!" they heard him say. "Can we play laser tag now?"

"Yeah, I guess," Emma said. "You know, if that's what you want to do or whatever." She was talking over her shoulder as she strode to the desk by the third word. "Belle's on my team!"

"You said we weren't playing teams!" Henry cried. He dropped his books and sprinted after his mother; Belle didn't have the heart to scold him, not for abandoning the job he'd wanted or for running in the library.

-

When she got home, there was a piece of paper stuck to the door. It was folded in thirds; Belle wiped her hand on the inside of her jacket—possibly the only dry spot on her person after that shower had caught her halfway through her walk—and took it down.

It was from her landlord.

 _Dear Resident (_____________________________),_ it began. Belle's name had been written on the line, with more care than the hand's owner normally had for his script. He didn't like to take the risk that someone might misread his contracts.

_Dear Resident (_____________________________),_

_This letter serves as notice that the terms of your lease will be changing the 1st of November, per page five of your original agreement. Your rent will not be impacted; however—_

Belle crumpled the letter in her fist. 

Later, after it had occurred to her that Rumpelstiltskin couldn't have been rendezvousing with Regina if he'd been otherwise engaged delivering lessor's notices to his tenants, she fished the letter out of the trash and took it with her to the wharf. He might have hired someone to do the work for him, but he'd always been a man concerned with the fine details. And something told her—some scent, perhaps, or some faint residue beneath her fingertips—something told her that he'd come in person...

Belle had never lived away from the sea, save for the time she'd spent in Rumpelstiltskin's castle and the few brief seasons she'd wandered the country after he'd cast her out. In retrospect, her decision to wander seemed foolish, perhaps even arrogant, but she'd been so determined to see the world, to make something of herself, and she hadn't paid attention to where her feet were taking her until it had been too late to turn back. She was glad, though, after everything, for the simple comfort of salt on the wind. In Avonlea, before her father had retreated to safer quarters, she'd been able to hear the gulls calling from her bedroom window.

 _Dear Resident,_ her letter said. 

She was well. She was not dear, but she was—she was better than well, she was sound of mind (almost certainly) and determined in her course (or nearly so). She was in a land where magic had no sway, and if the Evil Queen still dogged her footsteps, at least the woman hadn't the power to do anything but slash Belle's budget. Her own lack of knowledge needled her, of course; she didn't know how or why the people of her homelands had been stripped of her memories and set down in a place utterly without wonder, but she was weary of her own curiosity and had no more interest in boldness. Better to keep her head down and take what solace she could find.

Belle threw her letter in the ocean.

It bobbed on the crest of a wave, spun beneath the dock and out the other side, and then became too waterlogged to stay afloat; she felt a serene emptiness as she watched it sink. There wasn't any value in memory, not the one set or the other. Maybe she could be somebody new. Maybe she wouldn't be anyone at all.

-

Agatha Schwarzwald was third on Belle's shit list. She didn't rank as high as Regina, although that was largely a matter of circumstance; Agatha hadn't locked Belle away in the white room and then escaped all justice whatsoever, but she probably would have if given a glimmer of opportunity. She was a mean old woman, spiteful, miserly, and without any redeeming qualities. She also smelled like bacon. Belle had no idea why, but the odor hung around her perpetually. It was sickening rather than appetizing, and made Belle viscerally aware that bacon was little more than strips of cooked flesh.

Belle shut down the vacuum as soon as the door chimed. She was in the back below the stairs, where the children's books were shelved; the carpet there seemed to need twice as much care as the rest of the flooring combined. Someday she'd figure out how the little rats ground their Cheerios into that fine paste that coated even the tables.

Agatha was standing at the circulation desk, her upper lip curled as she read the sign Belle had posted about volunteer opportunities. The Councilwoman was dressed in an unrelieved black suit that made her look like an undertaker, although the quality of the tailoring would put any item of clothing in Regina's closet to shame. Her fingers twitched around the cigarette she was smoking against all ordinances as Belle approached, but she offered no greeting.

"Ms. Schwarzwald," Belle said, and came up short of words.

"Ms. French," Agatha said. "Still begging for help, I see. And how is the volunteer program?"

Belle waited for a sharp retort to jump from her mouth and was surprised at herself when none came. "Struggling," she said instead, and watched detachedly as Agatha's thin mouth drew up in what was intended as a smile.

"I've heard," the woman said. "And you've heard that it's time for your inspection, I suppose? Your...audit, as it were." Her teeth were small and unnaturally white, with the ashy, unreflective patina of bone. "Your records are troubling, girl, very troubling. Not tidy at all. The sign of a disordered mind, I shouldn't wonder."

Belle swallowed. "Where would you like to begin?"

"I would like to begin by seeing with my own eyes where exactly the taxpayers' dollars are going." Agatha dropped her cigarette to the floor and ground it out beneath the heel of one black boot; she didn't trouble herself to pick up the butt. "Well, girl? Are you deaf as well as dumb?"

"No, ma'am," Belle said.

The next hour and a half were among the most torturous experiences of Belle's life, and in her time she'd experienced a fair share of misery. Agatha Schwarzwald wasn't content to be shown the library, the accounting books, the order forms and schedules; she offered criticisms veiled as suggestions at every turn and made more than one overt reference to Belle's mental stability and the waste of money taken from good, honest, hardworking men and women. When Belle let slip that the monthly circulation was less than four hundred items, Agatha lit up a new cigarette, right there in the middle of Belle's office.

"I don't have to tell you that the Council is concerned, Ms. French. The Mayor has been more than generous, letting you run wild with this little project, but frankly I don't see the point. All those kiddies you say you're helping, you may have their parents fooled, but I know what's what." She sat down behind Belle's desk and shoved at the paperwork until it spilled off the sides; unconcerned, she set her purse in the cleared space and tapped a shower of ash to the floor. "We're calling you in for a formal performance review next month. You'll need three current references. One of them had better be from a professional, do we understand each other?"

Belle twisted her fingers together and nodded. She felt like a chastised school girl, trapped on the wrong side of her very own desk, but what could she do? Oh, she _hated_ , but stronger than that—stronger than that was the cold serpent of fear that was twisting its way up her spine and sinking into her heart.

"Good." Agatha took a drag and added abruptly, "I've seen your medical records and read your case notes, Ms. French. You might know that a flatter myself a classicist, and those stories you told...do you remember the tale of Cassandra?"

"Yes," said Belle, whose name was not French in this world or any other.

"Tragic. I've always thought so, at least. Do you remember what happened to her after the siege at Troy? Everyone knows of her peculiar gift, but few people know of her fate."

"I believe she was murdered," Belle said.

"Oh, very good, girl. She was. Captured and raped and taken as a harem slave and only then given the release of death. I've always hated the story; she brought that upon herself. She was helpless. She was weak."

"She wasn't—" 

"She was, and so are you," Agatha said. "Don't put on airs, Ms. French."

"No. Ma'am."

"Good," Agatha said for a third time. "Your review is on the 23rd at two o'clock. Don't be late, or it'll be upon your head."

"Yes, ma'am," Belle said, and kept her eyes fixed on the ground as Councilwoman Schwarzwald collected her purse, gathered her severity around her like a cloak, and swept from the room.

Belle was sure that this wasn't how—that this wasn't—

She knelt to pick up her paperwork. The manila folder was under her desk, along with a lost paper clip and two bits of chocolate; she shuffled the papers together and flattened them as best she could before returning them to her filing cabinet. After that she returned herself to her chair, folded her hands on the desktop, and let her head drop to rest on her forearms.

She took one shuddering breath and counted to three. When that didn't work, she took another, timing the inhalations to the heartbeat that thundered in her ears.

And then she called Emma's office.

" _Storybrooke Sheriff's Department_ ," said the dispatcher, who was a sweetheart if ever there was one. " _Is this an emergency?_ "

"No, Roland, it's Belle. Is Emma around?"

" _Ah, hang on—yeah, she's free. Transferring you now._ "

"Thanks," Belle said, and fought against a sob when she heard Emma's voice.

" _Hey, Belle? What's up?_ "

"Oh—" Belle did _not_ choke. "Oh, you know. How's Henry?"

" _Henry's Henry. Are you sure you're okay? Because you sound—_ "

"Dust," Belle lied. "In my mouth. You know how dirty this place gets. Anyway, the reason I called is—do you know of a lawyer?"

" _...What?_ "

"Nevermind. It was a stupid idea."

Belle heard a clatter and imagined Emma putting her mug of coffee down forcefully; Emma rarely bothered doing anything without force. " _Sorry, uh. The only lawyer I know of in town is Mr. Gold, but good luck working with him. Is this about the budget again? Because getting someone to go over the city by-laws might be your ticket out of the whole mess with the Council. Actually, that's a great idea, we could..._ "

"It's personal," Belle said. "I'd better—I have to go. Thanks."

" _Sure thing_ ," Emma said, her tone packed with bewilderment. " _Talk to you later?_ "

"Of course," Belle said, and hung up the phone.

She hadn't realized that Gold was a lawyer by trade, rather than a professional monger, but of course he was the only attorney in town. Of course he was. And if she tried calling elsewhere for assistance, she could be certain that the telephone lines would go down or her computer's battery would refuse to hold a charge or whichever agency she did manage to contact would be flooded with work from another source. 

Since the library was little more than a glorified babysitting service, Belle felt only a minor pang of guilt when she locked up early. The town laws and records were housed in what had once been a storage closet; Storybrooke was, for all the vastness it held, still a small town. The charters and lawbooks she had were only copies, but there might be something there that would free her from the upcoming inquisition. She doubted the internet would help; Storybrooke was, legally as in all other ways, a world unto itself.

She studied until late, ignoring Emma's calls and finally turning her personal phone to silent, but the Mayor's rule was ironclad and the will of her minions absolute. The whole situation was ludicrous; she had to laugh a little when she found the clause that Regina had included prohibiting houses along the thoroughfare where her own home sat from being painted any color other than white; the cited reason was that it 'upsetted the aesthetics of the town's center of culture.' Belle had never met a woman who took as much care with her own appearance as the Mayor, and that innate vanity clearly extended not only to buildings but to entire neighborhoods.

When her eyes finally refused to focus any longer, Belle sat back and rubbed at her face. She'd been thoughtlessly chewing on her cuticles as she read, and now beads of blood gathered at the edge of her fingernail and dropped—one—two—three—onto the town charter.

Bleeding on official documents; she was such a mess. An ache in her shoulders made itself known as she unfolded from her stool, and she offered an apology to her body with a long, luxurious stretch. She felt too tired to sleep, as curious a feeling as that was, and she didn't think she could bear to go home to her empty apartment. In twenty-eight years locked in the Queen's prison, she hadn't once regretted her own company, although she had wished for the presence of others, but Agatha Schwarzwald had stolen that from her. Belle didn't want to be alone.

She went to Granny's, the only reputable establishment in Storybrooke open past ten. Hot chocolate sounded delicious, or maybe a cup of tea or coffee; it was that sort of night. The weather was on the edge of falling into autumn crispness, but the days were still warm, particularly when the afternoon sunshine came hot through the library windows. Nights, like now, were cool enough that she tugged her sweater sleeves down over her fingers.

Belle was weary enough for the walk that normally took her five minutes to drag to nearly twenty. Storybrooke after dark was a completely different town than Storybrooke by daylight, and while her feet dragged, Belle couldn't resist the notion that monsters were lurking behind the shadow of that car or this doorway. Her imagination had been the bane of her teachers, both in this land and Avonlea, and when she needed sleep it tended to run away without permission from the rest of her. 

The light from Granny's pooled in great arcs on the street; it seemed warmer than the light from the streetlamps, and friendly, and true with the promise of sanctuary and companionship. Belle could use both of those in her current state. The diner was also nearly empty, which suited her down to the tips of her toes. Ruby was inside, covering the late shift like she had no need for sleep, and Belle caught part of an arm and shoulder in a white coat that might mean Dr. Whale, and then she saw Dr. Hopper, sitting in a booth with a newspaper spread in front of him. He wasn't reading the newspaper. He was watching Ruby.

Belle let her hand fall from the doorknob and turned away.

-

There were two other restaurants in Storybrooke that stayed open late, the old pub closer to the docks and the trendier bar that was popular for sweethearts. Mrs. Crewe in Standard Clocks sometimes worked late, if her insomnia was impeding her ability to sleep so badly that she'd given up the battle, and Winkle's Convenience closed only for two hours before dawn so the proprietor could clean and restock without having to run off and fill a prescription.

One more store kept irregular hours, and that was Mr. Gold's Pawn Shop. Mr. Gold stayed open for days in a stretch and then closed for one week, or two; if she hadn't known better, Belle would've said that the Pawn Shop was a distraction, something to fill the idle hours of a man who made his living playing with real estate, but she'd turned from that opinion the first time she'd peered through the Pawn Shop's window. It was dusty and dark and filled with marvelous, bloody things, like a dragon's den or a magpie's nest. Belle had lived with all that clutter before, had even been in charge of putting it to some kind of system, but like Rumpelstiltskin, Mr. Gold resisted order.

She went to the Pawn Shop now, on a whim, driven to the familiar when her other havens had soured. The light from the store was not warm, like the light from the diner; it warned, rather than comforted. Belle ignored the warning and let herself inside without allowing a moment for thought. If she stopped to think, her nerves would fail her or her sense would stay her feet, one or the other.

"I'm afraid I was just about to lock—" Gold said, and then looked up.

And then stopped.

"Hello," Belle said.

"Good evening, Miss—"

"French."

"Ah, yes, Miss French. Something I can do for you, dear?"

"I need your services," Belle said.

Gold raised his brows. "Oh?"

"As a lawyer. I need you—I need a lawyer," Belle said. 

Gold's hands stilled, and he put down the old brown boot he'd been polishing. He was himself less polished than Belle was used to seeing; he'd taken off his jacket, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He was showing an almost unbearable amount of skin. Belle wished she could ask him why she remembered and he didn't, but it was a pointless question.

"And to what end would an upstanding woman like yourself need legal services?"

"I..." She looked around, searching for her departed initiative like it could be found among the pawned wedding rings and lion's-head bookends in Gold's shop. "I'm having trouble with the Mayor and the City Council," she finally explained. "They're trying to terminate my contract and close the library."

"You believe they aren't in their rights to do so?" 

"Yes. Yes. I do. I know you're"—Belle drew in a breath—"friendly with the Mayor, but Sheriff Swan says you're the only attorney in town, and I..." _Don't have anywhere else to turn_ , Belle almost said, but while she would've shown her desperation to Rumpelstiltskin, she couldn't bring herself to do so with Gold. "I could use the assistance."

He braced his hands against the counter and dipped his chin; if she hadn't been stealing little darting glances at him, she would've missed the way he never quite met her eyes, choosing instead to keep his gaze fixed just above her head.

"Friendly with the mayor, am I," he said. His voice was rougher and lacked the sibilant quality Belle remembered, but the cadence wasn't dissimilar and the underlying slyness was precisely the same. "That's an interesting way of putting it, dear. The devil must have told you that."

"Pardon me?"

"A turn of phrase. No, Miss French, I'm sorry to say that my legal services are not currently for sale. However, I do have a file you might find...illuminating. If you'll wait here, it shouldn't take long to locate."

Belle swallowed and nodded and watched voyeuristically as Gold collected his cane and disappeared into the back. She'd never been inside the store before, and now, partly to distract herself and partly because she was still hungry (so hungry, for any scrap about him), she turned to examine the walls. 

Her first thought was that he could really use some better lighting. The sills were cluttered enough and the windows grimy enough that even during the day, natural light wouldn't brighten the interior, and what electric lights he had were a haphazard mix of out-of-fashion lamps with stained-glass and bare bulbs. Belle wouldn't have been surprised to learn that he lit actual candles for purposes other than decorative, although that was of course ridiculous; nobody in this world worked by candlelight.

Then her eyes caught on the puppets. 

"Oh," Belle said.

There were sitting on the countertop, tucked behind a small chest with beads spilling from the mouth; Belle might not have noticed them if she hadn't seen them before. They were still grim, frightening little things, the enormous eyes and toothy grins enough to earn them top billing in any child's nightmare. After that she found one thing after another from Rumpelstiltskin's castle: the mummified hand, the endless goblet, the watercolor of a field of rampions, the gilt trio of apples, the red shoes sized for a child or a small woman, the miniature case of ornate thimbles, the bolts of silk and wool—those boots he had been polishing, those were Jack's seven-league boots...

"Something the matter, Miss French?"

"Oh!" Belle said again, startled anew. "No, I'm sorry. I was only—only looking."

"Yes, well. I've amassed quite a collection, as you can see. The file," he added, and set it on the counter between them, so she didn't have to take it directly from his hand.

"What is it?"

"Your employment contract," he said; he seemed to relish the way her eyes widened. "Oh yes. The Mayor occasionally engages my services when some legal trivia arises that is beyond her ability to handle. I negotiate divorces, too, you know."

"No," Belle said. "I didn't." And like that, she was back in Storybrooke, where the pawn shop was a dingy secondhand brokering ground only a step removed from the blackmarket, as un-castle-like as possible, and its proprietor was a bent, wicked man who couldn't give a rat's ass about Belle or her problems. "What's the price?"

"The price?" Gold said.

"The price. Your price. Isn't that what you do? Make...bargains?"

"Something like that." He resumed his pose behind the counter, hands outstretched and braced against the glass top. Belle felt a tidal wave of spite roll over her and bit back telling him that he was going to break his stupid counter and cut up his stupid, lovely hands. 

"I'll tell you what," he said. "You can owe me a favor."

"No," Belle said, immediately.

"Don't trust me, dear?"

Belle couldn't answer that, and didn't.

"Then why don't you see if you can get your father to pay his bills on time. He owes me...quite a lot of money, and he'll soon be in arrears if he doesn't make good on his debt. I might have to confiscate his truck again," Gold said, and smirked.

"I'll speak to him, but I can't force him to pay if he doesn't have the money."

"Then I suppose you'll owe me that favor." He tapped the folder. "You'll find it helpful. I know that the Mayor misplaced your employee file some months ago."

Regina had, and at the time Belle didn't have the energy or concentration to insist a new contract be drawn up. "There are things I won't do," she said. 

"Attentive to the details. I approve. Would you like to write down your terms?"

"No," Belle said, "but I want your word that you won't force me to do something I'm not comfortable doing."

"Provided you use your power of veto judiciously."

"That's acceptable," Belle allowed, and although she knew she should have a written agreement—she couldn't help it. She did trust him. It was instinctual, something so innate to her self that even her confusion and anger and grief couldn't strike it from her soul.

"Then, Miss French, we have a deal. I believe this is yours." He made a solicitous gesture of deference, something that might have been the beginning of a bow.

"Thank you," Belle said.

"You're quite welcome." He watched her take the file with glittering eyes; she couldn't make herself turn her back to him, and she had to twist her arm around to fumble with the doorknob.

"Thank you. I mean—good evening," Belle said, and slipped away.

Now she did go home. She checked the door of her apartment before unlocking it; once she was inside, she flung her keys at the far wall and collapsed to the ground, strings cut, back against the door like her inconsequential mass could keep the world out. She didn't cry; tears were unnecessary. Tears wouldn't break locks or free creatures from their cages. 

After her breath had returned and she felt she could open her eyes, Belle took the folder to her kitchen and set it on the table. She couldn't see how it would get her out of this mess, but it was the only bit of paper connected to the whole thing she hadn't read. 

"God," she said, more to the flower in the window than herself. "God, this is nuts."

The flower said nothing.

"Maybe I really am crazy," Belle said, and put her head down, and laughed. She fell asleep that way, her check smashed against the file and her hands twitched restlessly as she dreamed. She didn't wake up until later in the morning, when the Sheriff came knocking at her door.

-

Emma was roaring.

"Iz? Isabelle! You open this door right now or I swear, I will break it down!"

Belle groaned and attempted to hide her head under one arm.

"I am completely serious! I can do it, don't think I won't, I'm the Sheriff and that means nobody can arrest me! ISABELLE FRENCH!"

"Coming," Belle muttered. 

"I KNOW YOU'RE HOME, MRS. CREWE SAID SHE SAW YOU COME IN LAST NIGHT—"

"Coming!" Belle hollered back. She stood up and then winced as all the aches of the evening before met the soreness of sleeping at a table. 

Emma had a hand on her pistol—that was a comfort thing, for her—and almost smacked Belle on the forehead as she drew back her hand to pound on the wall again. "Iz! Jesus, are you okay?"

"I'm fine, I fell asleep in the kitchen. Would you really break down my door?" she asked, interested in spite of herself.

"Damn right I would," Emma said. "What the hell is going on with you? You call me last night and then I find out that you're actually trying to _hire_ Gold, how the hell do you think—and Henry says you haven't been going to your appointments with Hopper—"

"Could we have this conversation inside?" Belle interrupted. The walk-up to her floor was a narrow flight of stairs that funneled noise like a loudspeaker.

"Yeah, sure," Emma said, and pushed inside without actually ceasing her tirade. "You can't skip therapy like that, I'm a basketcase and even I know that you need to be getting professional help!"

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"No, don't do that. You don't get to be cute about this!"

"No," Belle said, "you don't do that! You can't shove your way in here and tell me how to run my life!"

"The hell I can't!"

"The hell you can!" Belle snapped. "For your information I had a perfectly, exquisitely valid reason for trying to hire _Mr._ Gold!"

"And what was that?"

"None of your business!"

"Fine!" Emma said. "See if I care!" She turned on her heel, intent on storming out the door, when her boot caught on Belle's keys and she tripped. Her expression was one of complete indignation as she toppled to the floor.

Belle laughed.

"Oh, I see how it is," Emma grumbled. "Throwing me out and then yukking it up? I'm onto you, French."

"Shut up," Belle said, but it came out sounding more like "sh-sh-shup" through her cackling. Emma rolled her eyes and blew a hank of hair out of her face.

"See if I ever loan you clothes again."

"You never loan me clothes, even when I ask!" Belle managed.

"Yeah, well, like they'd fit you anyway. You're a midget."

"You're a giantess!"

"Henry would like that," Emma said, flopping on her back. 

"He's still in the fairy tale phase?"

"You have no idea." She groaned; Belle nudged her with a toe, and Emma swatted at Belle's ankle. "Hey, now that you're done trying to kill me, maybe we can eat breakfast and talk about this like rational adults?"

Belle heaved a sigh. "You just want me to cook for you."

"Guilty as charged," Emma said, and had the nerve to look completely unapologetic.

Belle had to clear aside a stack of books (Bradley's _I Am Half-Sick of Shadows_ , Klein's _All in the Blue Unclouded Weather_ , Anderson's _Tirra Lirra by the River_ , and Christie's _The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side_ ) to make room for Emma in the kitchen. Emma started the coffee maker before taking her seat.

"You can't not go to therapy, Iz," she said.

"With tact like that, it's small wonder you're so successful as a sheriff." Belle busied herself with the refrigerator; she had enough eggs for omelets, but Emma refused to eat eggs any way but plain with a little salt. Belle huffed and took out her last bit of bacon, too.

"Got any potatoes?"

"No," Belle said. "If you want potatoes, you can fry them yourself." Emma grunted in displeasure, but Belle was still half asleep and would not be bullied into more work than necessary just because her friend wanted hash browns.

"You know, if this town had a McDonald's—"

"You'd die of malnutrition in weeks. Over easy or scrambled?"

"Over easy," Emma said. "I'm serious. Regina may have skipped out on the charges by passing the blame along to the hospital admin, but just because we couldn't pin the responsibility on her doesn't mean what she put you through was any less terrible. You have post-traumatic stress...probably!"

"You read my file!"

"I...okay, I read your file. Only a little!"

"Emma!"

"What? Archie shouldn't have left me alone in the same room as the filing cabinet. Anyway, I just peeked."

"You—"

"Hey hey, you picked up Mary Margaret's diary that one time—"

"It was an accident!" Belle cried. "I thought it was a book!"

"Yeah, okay. A _handwritten_ book?"

"Publishers aren't obligated to use—"

"Fine, you didn't mean to." Emma opened her mouth, shut it, frowned, and then said, "And I'm sorry, all right? I was worried about you."

"I forgive you. I don't mind, really." _Because I haven't told Dr. Hopper anything particularly useful, or even true_ , Belle didn't add. She pressed that thought to the back of her mind. 

"Oh, come on, you mind a little—I would."

"I mind a little," Belle corrected, "but I forgive you anyway. And I made you eggs."

"Sister, I owe you," Emma a said, and took her plate. "A smiley face? Really?" Belle had indeed arranged the bacon below the set of egg yolks so Emma's breakfast resembled a lopsided, cartoonish grin.

"You did mention you wanted to chaperone the lock-in next month, didn't you?" Belle said sweetly.

"Shit," Emma said.

"Fantastic. I'll make sure your name is on the list." Belle took of bite of her own eggs (over-hard, as runny yolks were _disgusting_ ). 

"On the condition that you'll steer clear of Gold and Regina and, and—whatever other evil jackasses this town is harboring."

"I'll speak with whomever I choose."

"Iz, just work with me here, okay? I don't need you getting cornered by the Mayor again."

"Emma," Belle said, putting down her bacon and fisting her hands in her lap. "Listen to yourself. Would you listen to the advice you're giving me? I don't need you to tell me that Regina's a rotten apple—"

"I know you don't, but apparently someone does need to warn you about Mr. Gold. He is absolutely no good, and he'll talk you out of the shirt on your back if you don't pay attention—"

"Emma," Belle said again, the warning in her voice as clear as a chime.

"Tell me you'll keep it in mind, at least."

"I'll take it under consideration. No promises."

"And you'll call me if you have any trouble."

"And I'll call you if I have any trouble," Belle parroted obediently.

"Good. Then yes, fine, I'll chaperone your stupid lock-in. Please tell me we're playing laser tag."

"We're playing laser tag."

"Thank god," Emma said, and apparently in renewed spirits, started to chew her eggs again. "Wanna come hang out with me and Henry? Regina has some kind of super secret meeting, so she said I could have him for the whole day."

"I should work—"

"Take the day off."

"Really, I need to—"

"It's Sunday," Emma said. "Sunday is a day of rest."

"Oh, in that case. I didn't realize you and Henry were planning on resting instead of charging around the park, play-fighting with sticks, but if you're going to be _resting_..."

"That's a yes?"

"If you don't mind waiting while I shower." Belle sniffed and made a mock face of disgust, contorting her mouth and displaying the bits of bacon still stuck to her teeth. Emma snorted and nearly spit up her coffee.

"We," Belle said, "are such wonderful role models."

"Pillars of the community," Emma agreed. "Everything adult women should be. You know what this town needs? An amusement park."

"A roller coaster and carousel, at very least."

"Yeah, I could see it. Actually, in Storybrooke it'd be more like something out of a horror movie—you know, the creepy abandoned rides."

"Serial killer clowns lurking around every corner..."

"That's a lot of clowns," Emma said. "Hey, you go shower, I'll do the dishes."

"Thanks," Belle said, grateful, and took herself down the hall to the bathroom. All humor aside, she did still smell like stale sweat. She intended to be quick—Emma, when left alone, invariably started trying to fix appliances that weren't really broken—but when she realized she'd forgotten to put on her shower cap, she decided Emma wouldn't mind if she took the time to wash her hair. Belle's hair was one of her few concessions to impracticality; a shorter haircut would probably suit her better. Maybe not something as short as Mary Margaret's, but a shoulder-length style would be so much easier on her drains...after she turned off the water, she rubbed the condensation away from the mirror and tucked her hair up around her neck.

"Did you get sucked down the pipes?" Emma shouted.

"Out in a minute!" Belle shouted back, and then, "Don't touch the electric kettle!"

Shorter hair. Ridiculous. Belle sighed and started to work combing out the tangles. If she braided it wet, it shouldn't frizz too much around her face; she liked her long hair, but abhorred spending time on it. The last time she'd used her hair dryer she'd been distracted by the small volume of Siken hiding under the vanity. The smell of hair starting to burn had been the thing to drag her attention back.

Emma had managed to keep her fingers off the electronics, and they made their way to Emma's yellow Beetle together, jostling on the stairs for the lead. (Emma won, but only by tugging on the bottom of Belle's braid.) When the collapsed into the car together, both breathless, Belle almost opened her mouth and shared what she hadn't with Dr. Hopper: a story that sounded fantastic and absurd, full of castles and knights and magic...

She caught her tongue between her teeth and used the bite of pain to keep herself from speaking. The last time she'd trusted, her trust had been returned to her without a thought for her courage, and look—she'd ended up locked in a dungeon, caught between this world and the last.

"Henry's gonna be excited," Emma was saying. "He's always begging me to invite you along. It's great to see him so often, but man, that kid has got a mind of his own."

"Purely coincidental, no idea how he inherited that trait," Belle said automatically. "You're certain you don't mind me tagging along? I don't want to intrude."

"Have you ever known me to willingly spend time with someone I didn't like? Don't answer that. No, seriously, the kid and I both love having you around. You, uh. You know that, right?" Emma kept her eyes fixed on the road, but she gave a suspicious little twitch toward the passenger side; Belle couldn't tell if Emma was aborting a hug or flinching from a discussion about sentiment.

"I do," Belle said. "Thank you."

"Aw, no, don't—don't thank me. You're doing me a favor, hanging around the town pariah. Hey, is that a snow cone stand?"

"Yes. I believe it's the same one you visit at least once a week after lunch."

"Oh." Emma smoothed a hand over her hair. "Yep, sure enough."

Belle rolled her eyes at the three socks and bundled a-shirt strewn across the passenger-side floor—clearly the detritus of Emma's last trip to the laundromat. They didn't often take Emma's car, since both of them preferred to walk and the town was small enough to allow it, but the Mayor's house was in a gated neighborhood a few minutes outside of the main hub. Like Emma, the slugbug was a contradictory but fascinating amassment of qualities, and Belle suspected the car was more home to Emma than her Boston apartment ever had been. In addition to the laundry remnants, it had collected a number of knickknacks (a Red Sox bobblehead in the rear window, a box of matches from a Singer Salvage behind the driver's seat, a baseball bat from either Henry's pick-up games or Emma's previous trade in the back), trophies (a clipped article from a newspaper in Portland about a fugitive found with a bailbondsperson's help, an astrolabe Belle recognized from Rumpelstiltskin's castle), and garbage (a ball of aluminum foil that had leaked ketchup onto the carpet, an array of used zip ties, a coffee mug so stained that the brown tidemarks seemed part of the ceramic). 

"We should clean your car," she said.

Emma scoffed. "Yeah, that sounds like a fun way to spend the day. The worst part is that Henry'll probably clean with you; he's as much of a neat freak as you are." She considered. "Well, maybe not quite as much, but still, I swear. You should see his comic books—he keeps them in plastic sleeves. And they're alphabetized."

"The horror," Belle said, dryly.

Henry was waiting for them outside of his mother's house, to Belle's relief. He was wearing his navy peacoat and had not only his knapsack but a nylon diamond kite in tow. The twin blue and yellow tails were looped around his neck so many times that Belle thought he might choke if he tripped.

He yanked open the rear door and nearly clobbered himself in the face. "Emma! Emma, look what I found!"

"It's a kite," Emma said.

"Yep! Miss Blanchard found a bunch of old toys in her attic and she let everyone pick something and I got to go third because she pulled my name out of the hat. Paige picked a flower."

"Paige?" Belle asked.

"Hi, Issy," Henry said, climbing into the car after a brief struggle with the kite. "She's a girl in my class."

 _Crush_ , Emma mouthed.

"It's one of those flowers that squirts water in your face. She said she thought her dad would think it's funny."

Belle twisted in her seat. "Who's her father?"

"Jefferson," Emma answered. "Strange guy, keeps to himself."

"He doesn't have a library card," Belle said, which was the sort of thing she knew. "You should ask her to the activity group, Henry."

"Oh yeah," Henry said. "I bet she'd like that. Emma, are we going to the park?"

"We sure are, kiddo," Emma said. "Thought we could go to Granny's for lunch and then maybe back to my place for a movie."

Storybrooke's best park was located just to the south of downtown, along a stretch of shoreline that sat at the bottom curve of a crescent bay. Emma helped Henry and his kite out of the car and set to work detangling; Belle watched them, amused and touched at how wholly absorbed they were in each other. In the bluest moon imaginable she sometimes had abstract thoughts about being a mother, but there was only one person she'd want to father her children, and she couldn't see that working in any universe, not even if the spiderweb that held them all captive came apart.

She sat down on a park bench a few yards away from where Emma and Henry were now trying to attach the string to the kite; there appeared to be some disagreement about the best kind of knot to use, and the discussion was getting heated. Henry finally glanced away and realized that Belle had wandered off. He waved at her, but she smiled and shook her head. Henry conferred with Emma before turning and running at her full-tilt, his short legs making unpredictably quick work of the sandy knoll.

"Issy, don't you want to go kite-flying?"

"You go ahead," Belle said. "I'm going to sit here and enjoy the sunshine. Maybe take off my shoes." She suited action to word by kicking off her sneakers without untying the laces. "Don't let Emma fool you into thinking she knows what she's doing, alright? I don't think she's ever flown a kite before."

"I think you're right," Henry said. "Good thing she has me around to show her how to do it." He dropped his knapsack next to Belle and pulled out the thick, folio-sized book with the leather cover that Belle had seen him studying more than once. This, she surmised, was his book of fairy tales.

He clutched it to his chest and hesitated before offering it to her. "Here," he said, "you can read this. You can't tell my mom about it, though, okay?"

"I would never," Belle said solemnly. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," Henry said, equally but not comically serious; he turned on his heel and raced back to Emma, who had somehow gotten the kite string tangled around a piece of driftwood.

Belle dug her toes into the sand, wiggled them until she'd made comfortable little grooves, and opened Henry's book. It had more text and fewer illustrations than she'd expected, although what illustrations there were had been beautifully drawn in a style distinct from what she usually found in fairy tale collections. It took her only a few minutes to discern that many of the stories had different endings from the traditional versions, or different beginnings, or sometimes different characters all together; and only a few minutes past that to realize that the book didn't tell the gross approximations of her own homeland that were popular in this world as fiction, but the actual events. And the faces in the pictures were so familiar...

It took her some time to find _The Beauty and the Beast_ , because she kept coming across people she knew. So that was why that dwarf in the pub had seemed so heartsick; and here was why Mary Margaret had been dressed in furs and carrying a bow when Belle had first met her; and now she found an explanation of the slumbering man with the long beard and the plate mail she'd found out beyond the Lantern Wastes.

Her own history had no pictures. Belle located it in the back, one of the last chapters before the appendices, and found it started as all stories started. What surprised her was that it wasn't written in broad strokes of stock characters and thinly-veiled moral fables; it was, instead, exact. 

_Beauty often explored the castle, when she was not cleaning or cooking or bringing the Beast straw; since he had little use for cleaning and little need for food and could summon straw from the cellar for only the price of a few drops of blood, she had much time to use as she would. Exploration was, alongside the library and the Beast's stories, her chief pleasure._

_She found the rose garden after the last frost of the winter had thawed. A hundred thousand buds were just beginning to unfurl, and while a few ambitious blossoms were spread open, most were little knots of petals, bright spots of red or pink or black or yellow or white or blue (imagine—blue roses!) that decorated the riot of verdant leaves._

_The garden was in an open courtyard beyond the tower where the Beast's personal suite was housed, and had been tended recently—and by hand, Beauty thought. She was learning, slowly, to tell the difference between what magic wrought and was was the product of mere work and will. There were no fountains or benches, as there were in the more ornate gardens on the grounds, although the grass was worn in one spot beside a very deep red rose, as if someone sat there on the ground often. The red rose captivated her for ages; the center furl was a crimson so dark it was nearly black, but then lightened as it spread outward to a scarlet she'd only ever seen at sunset..._

_The Beast found her there some hours later; she had moved to sit in front of a rose so soft a lavender it seemed white at first glance. "Did you get lost, dearie?" he said, although he was more somber at the sight of her in the rose garden than was his usual wont._

_"Oh," Beauty said. "I'm sorry, I just—I've never seen roses before, outside of a storybook. They're lovely." 'Lovely' struck her an inadequate description, but she suspected that in all the books in all the world there was not a word for this garden._

_"And why is that?" the Beast said. "They're just flowers."_

_"No, they aren't!" She found herself upset with him, although she did not understand why that thoughtless remark would anger her. "Only sorcerers can grow roses, and these are..."_

_The Beast, as he often did, looked at her strangely. "That's a myth, although one I've not heard before. They've gone out of style—too old-fashioned, would be my guess—but a man can grow roses as well as a sorcerer." He reached down and pinched a flower from its bush before Belle could stop him; at her distress, he lifted one shoulder and dropped it. "It'll grow back soon enough, dearie, never fear."_

_He spent a moment starting at the rose he'd plucked; it was white, but the white of linen rather than snow._

_"Should I not come here?" Beauty asked._

_"Oh no," said the Beast. "You are free to come here, dearie, as often as you like. More than welcome. Consider this an invitation."_

"Iz?"

She remembered how sweet that garden had smelled, the scent so thick that it clung to her skirts...

"Iz? Issy! Are you okay?"

Emma was shouting again.

"Iz! Iz, look at me!"

She dragged her eyes away from the page reluctantly; Emma was frantic, her eyes wide and her mouth tight, and Belle hoped she hadn't worried her friend—

"Isabelle!"

"I'm sorry," Belle said.

"Are you okay?" 

"I'm fine, why...?"

"You're crying," Emma said.

Belle lifted her hand and touched three fingers to her face. "So I am," she said. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean—"

"Oh Christ," Emma said. "Don't be sorry. I leave you alone for five minutes and I find you crying over a book, I swear."

"Don't swear, Emma," Henry said, and Belle realized he was peering from out from behind Emma's back. "I didn't mean to make you cry, Iz!"

"Honestly, I promise I'm not having a breakdown. This is a wonderful book, though, Henry, thank you. It's really very...lovely."

Henry came around and set his hands in front of hers, where she had the book open on her knees. "It's special," he said.

"It is," Belle said. "Make sure you take good care of it."

"I do. See, Emma?"

"Whatever you say, kid," Emma said.

"Now," Belle said, and wiped the last of the tears from her cheeks. "I know someone mentioned lunch at Granny's, but I think I'd rather have ice cream first."

"Ice cream!" Henry said.

"Fantastic. Crying and now sugar," Emma said, but she looked more concerned than affronted.

-

Belle made time that week to visit her father; she had, after all, her end of a bargain to uphold. She loved him dearly, but there was a distance between them that Belle had come to view as natural. Turning that thought over too frequently made her invariably sad, but the sadness was a gentle, slow mourning rather than the cacophony that other thoughts awoke in her. 

After she'd been carted away, Maurice had sold his home and moved into the spare room in the back of Game of Thorns. (She'd been surprised to learn that he hadn't changed the name, which had been Belle's idea and which he had always hated. She'd taken it from one of her favorite novels.) Belle suspected the move had been precipitated by a need for funds. Her father was in one sense a peerless businessman, gregarious and fair, with an eye for marketing and a creativity that was matched only by his work ethic, but he was also bad with money. Without Belle's head for numbers, he'd quickly fallen into debt, and Belle didn't need her father to tell her who it was who held his loans. She'd recently taken over his books again, and hoped to soon present him with a check large enough that he could move out of the shop all together.

He emerged from behind an enormous rubber tree plant at the jingle of the shop bell, his face creasing in pleasure when he saw her. "Hello, sweetheart," he said, and opened his arms for a hug.

"Papa," she said, a habit that even the proximity of the Mayor couldn't break. He smelled like potting soil and greenery, earthy and comforting.

"What's brought you to the florist's?" he said, after he'd released her.

Belle hopped up on the counter like a girl—she had memories, however false, of doing exactly this when she _had_ been a girl, and Maurice had always scolded her, but never had he actually tried to chase her away. "Can't a woman visit her dad?"

"A woman can," he said. "And my daughter does, but you've got that look on your face—"

"What look?" Belle said, peeved.

"That look," he said. "The look you get when you're about to tell me I can't hand out carnations at the senior center for free."

"Well you can't, not if you want to turn a profit," Belle said.

"The old ladies like 'em. The gents, too. Never saw harm in making someone's gran smile." He presented her with a carnation, and she threw up her hands. "Go on," he said.

"Oh, fine." Belle took the flower from him and tucked it behind her ear. "I can't be mad at you when you're right."

"What's that?"

"Quiet," she said. "I do have something to tell you. Mr. Gold says—"

"You've been talking to him?"

"I have. He had some paperwork I needed, and when I stopped by his store he asked me to talk to you about your finances. I know you have enough money—" She paused when she saw how pale he'd gone. Her father's skin was normally a ruddy red; he practically glowed with good humor. Now he looked on the verge of fainting.

"He's dangerous, Belle," her father said. "You stay away from him."

"Why," Belle said, " _why_ is it that people today seem so determined to tell me how to run my life? I am thirty years old, I think I can make my own decisions!"

"I'm not trying to do anything but keep my girl safe. I haven't told you, Iz, but the last time I couldn't make my payment on time he took me out to his cabin and beat me. Just about broke my arm," her father said, and held out his hand so Belle could see the scars the climbed past his wrist and disappeared under his cuff.

"He did _what_?"

"Stay away from him," Maurice said. "Please, Iz."

"All right, Papa," she agreed, but her mind was far away, racing ahead of itself. If only she had answers, if only she could understand what magic had crept inside Storybrooke's residents and veiled their eyes—but _no_ , she was making excuses for him again. He had _hurt her family_.

"No," Belle said. "No. I won't promise that, but I can promise he won't come near you again. Do you hear me? He won't come near you again."

Her father looked at her, and then he shut his eyes. "You're not right in the head, Iz. Getting mixed up with Gold, and that woman from the Council—"

"What woman?"

"Schwarzwald," Maurice said. "Stopped by the other day and bought...let's see...crocuses, I think. Seemed far too delicate for how severe she was, but who'm I to judge a customer's tastes?" He shrugged philosophically. "She said you'd invited her to stop by, but I have to tell you, I didn't like the look of her."

Belle's vision blurred and then refocused; her father's store suddenly seemed hyperreal, every line crystalline and too sharp.

"I have to go," she said. "I love you."

"Love you too," Maurice said, gruff but happy that she'd told him something she hadn't in too long. "Don't do anything rash."

"Me?" Belle said. "Never."

She didn't remember the walk home, although she was nearly run down two separate times by drivers who had never had so much as a parking ticket. To top off the evening, there was another note on her door.

_Dear Resident (_____________________________),_

_Per a previous communication dated (__/__/__), you are required to agree to the new terms of your lease by no later than the first of the following month. Please sign the enclosed document and—_

Belle snarled. She seized the letter with both hands and yanked, tearing it from the door and down the middle, and then tearing it in half again, and again, and once more, and then opened her hands and let the shreds flutter to the ground. When that didn't satisfy the deep, rolling pit of rage that slept behind her heart, she bolted down the corridor and back outside in the open air.

It started to storm as she crossed Guilder Avenue; by the time she passed the town's welcome sign, her feet were sloshing in her shoes, her clothes were soaked through, and her hair was sticking to her neck in wet clumps. She couldn't see much beyond the striping on the road's shoulder, but anger drove her onward, anger made her insensate and desperate to move.

She had started to shiver when she saw the headlights; the rain wasn't as pounding but the lightning was more ferocious than it had been. Whoever was driving in this weather was almost as much of a fool as she was.

Cold and tired and folded inside herself as she was, it took her even longer to realize that the car had pulled up next to her—in the wrong lane, nonetheless, so the driver could roll down his window and speak to her.

"You look like you need—" Mr. Gold said; the rest of his words were swallowed by the crack of thunder.

"Get away from me!" Belle shouted.

"Get in the car!" he shouted back. She'd never heard him shout in this world, and only once in the old one.

"No!" 

His teeth flashed, and he put the car in gear, creeping down the road to keep pace with her as she hurtled down the road. "You'll catch your death out here, let me give you a ride!"

"Go to hell!" 

"Whatever you say, dear," he snapped. He seemed as angry as she was, although it was hard to make out his face beyond the brief flashes the lightning afforded as he withdrew and swerved back into the proper lane. _Good_ , Belle thought savagely, but then she realized he'd only pulled away to turn the car; it was now blocking the entire road, her path included, and the next idiot driver to come speeding 'round the bend would wreck him.

"Get in the car," he said.

"No."

"You think your father wants you to catch your death by the side of the road?"

"Like you care about my father!" She tried to pick her way around the car's front, but the shoulder fell away abruptly past the reach of her foot.

"Ah!" Gold said. "Then you're trying to please the Mayor by ridding her of one of her more persistent problems?"

Belle, trapped, furious, felt her mouth fall open.

And then she said, "Fine."

She clutched herself and shivered viciously while he backed up and swung around to give her easier entrance. The car's interior was cozy, the heater running at full blast; Belle extended her hands until she was nearly cupping the vents and glared when Gold reached over to adjust the temperature.

He seemed to know that she had no desire for conversation; Belle hoped he'd also managed to sense precisely how revolted she felt by his presence. She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead and concentrated on keeping herself from hiccuping. She was at first disturbed that he knew where she lived without directions, and then, for a flicker in time, surprised at herself for being concerned before she remembered her anger; and at last she hated herself for forgetting that this man was not who she'd thought he was.

Belle was clawing at the door before he put the car in park. She heard him sigh as she groped for the lock. "Have you read the file, Miss French?"

"I don't want anything of yours," Belle bit out, and then her fingers found the correct button and she was out, she was free and slamming the car door behind her and rushing for her building like a rabbit for its warren.

-

The next morning she called and made an appointment with Dr. Hopper. He handled all his own scheduling and seemed flustered when she identified herself.

" _Ms. French! Well, I have to admit it's a surprise to hear from you, but I can't say this isn't encouraging. What can I do for you?_ "

"I'd like to make an appointment, please," Belle said. There was a fleck of egg stuck to her green formica countertop, and she scrapped idly at it with a fingernail while Dr. Hopper searched for his calendar.

" _Ah, here we are—how soon? If it's an emergency I can see you this afternoon, but otherwise...perhaps in the evening, two days out?_ "

"Perfect."

" _If you don't mind me saying so, I'm glad you've chosen to resume speaking with me. Not, ah, not that there's any reason you should—but I was concerned. In a professional capacity!_ "

Belle smiled.

"I understand, Dr. Hopper, and no, I appreciate that."

" _Have the nightmares resumed?_ "

"Occasionally," Belle admitted.

" _I'm sorry to hear that. Hopefully we can work together to give you some peace of mind._ "

"Thanks," Belle said. "See you Friday?"

" _You're on my schedule, Ms. French._ "

Belle didn't know if it was her impending appointment with Dr. Hopper or merely a distraction from the preparation she knew she should be doing for the injunction with the City Council, but she found her mind wandering to those first few, frantic days after she'd wandered out of the hospital's basement, too thin and with matted hair and the dead-eyed stare of a soldier home from the war. She'd never discovered what charitable soul had opened the door to her cell; it had seemed to swing wide of its own accord, waiting for Belle to make her decision. Stay or go. Known or unknown. She'd wasted a precious handful of moments gathering her courage and her wits and then she'd stepped outside, and when she hadn't been stopped she'd taken another step, and then another, until she was stumbling up the stairs and through the access door and into daylight.

Emma called every day to check on her, which made her feel appreciated but also stifled. There'd been some of kind of vandalism at Granny's restaurant that had kept the Sheriff busy. Emma wasn't worried—she seemed convinced that the culprits were bored teenagers acting out their claustrophobia—but Granny was demanding an arrest, and there were certain of Storybrooke's citizens even Emma knew better than to offend.

Belle occupied herself instead with cleaning the library from A to Z. She polished the shelves, swept the cobwebs from the ceilings, waxed the floors, and disassembled the four public access computers to blow the dust from their component parts. By the end of the week her knees were bruised and her hands were chapped, but the library was gleaming and Belle felt prepared to point to that, at least, as one aspect of her job she could perform competently. She'd even scrubbed the toilets and poured vinegar down the drains in the restrooms; there had been an odd moment where she was sure she'd heard the vibrato bass rumble of some enormous animal coming up through the pipes, but that clearly was her imagination. The story of the week for the children's group had been _Where the Wild Things Are_ ; beasts were clearly much on her mind.

Once she conquered the dirt, she turned to the collection. The library's open stacks were a patchwork of old, much-used books from the institution's younger days—before her incarceration, Belle had worked under Martin Mogget, the first and only other librarian to reside in Storybrooke, an absent-minded but delightful man who was far more concerned with how many books he could pack into the building than their condition, and who had as a result shopped at flea markets and estate sales for their materials—and the newer volumes of many and wildly divergent genres Belle had purchased with her meagre budget and, sometimes, with her personal funds. She'd tried to introduce an A/V section, which other than the children's groups was the runaway success of her tenure. 

She repaired bindings and glued or stitched loose pages and even managed to track down most of the patrons with fines over the ten-dollar limit, although Jack Larrie had attempted a lie so outrageous, a sordid tale that involved at least three mistresses and his mother's wicked new husband, who of course bore a personal grudge against him, Jack, that Belle had waived his charges entirely. She didn't believe a word of it, but he was wildly entertaining and she appreciated a good story.

She also concentrated on not being angry. This she accomplished through a succession of techniques that included, in turn, three daily cups of herbal tea, meditation, jogging, aromatherapy, boxing, and, when all else failed, more cleaning. She feel into bed exhausted every night, too tired to read and almost too tired to dream.

The morning of her appointment with Dr. Hopper she spent helping an older man sort through the town's map collection and putting together an ad campaign advertising library services and calling for volunteers. If she couldn't have another staff person, maybe some of the older children would want community service hours over their winter break. (Belle hoped to fob reshelving off on _someone_.) Ad campaigns in Storybrooke were poor affairs, maybe a week's worth of ads in the Mirror and a notice on the bulletin boards at the Town Hall and Granny's, but Belle ran off some full- and half-sheet flyers and tacked them to streetlights around town. Mrs. Crewe even let her post one in the window of Standard Clocks; there was that.

The therapy session itself was anticlimactic. Belle cried, a little, and managed to tell Dr. Hopper what her nightmares actually constituted. He listened, and jotted notes on his legal pad (but not frequently enough to make her uncomfortable), and offered advice in his calm, memorable voice. He asked Belle if she'd tried journaling, and when she said no, he went to his desk and rummaged around until he found a brown volume the size of a trade paperback with creamy, lined pages. "For you," he said. "No, no, it's a gift."

"Thank you," Belle said.

He asked her if she'd been having panic attacks, and said that while he was glad she hadn't been, some kind of release was not only acceptable but healthy. He offered her a prescription if she was having trouble sleeping through the night, but warned her to not abuse the medication. He was in all ways thorough, gentle, and exacting, and at the end of fifty minutes Belle emerged from his cavernous office feeling as if her wounds had been lanced. Emma was right.

And speaking of—Regina was waiting in the reception area, scowling at her phone as Henry fidgeted at her side. "Miss French," she said, standing when Belle entered; she towered, especially so in her stiletto shoes, and more than that one of the few people who had ever made Belle feel small. "I'm glad I caught you. I have some bad news; your hearing with the Council had been moved to Monday."

"I—pardon?" Belle said. Monday was _four days_ away; she'd thought she had weeks more, time to speak with Dr. Hopper about appearing as a character witness, time to finish combing through the archives, plenty of time that was now stolen from her.

"I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm afraid it was unavoidable."

Henry waved at her, a dangerous display of support, but Belle was so stunned she didn't return it. "That's..."

"Yes?" the Queen said.

Belle felt something rising in her, something that had been long buried and now unfurled in her heart like a flower reaching for the sun. "That's unacceptable," she said.

If she hadn't been looking Regina straight in the eye, she would've missed the way the woman froze before rolling into her usually silky control. "Do you believe you can dictate the actions of the ruling body of this town, Miss French?"

"They aren't the ruling body of this town," Belle said. "You are. The Council does whatever you say. And furthermore, according to your own statues, you have to provide me with written notice no less than one week in advance before changing the time of an official hearing. I'm going out with my father on Monday."

"Your _father_?" Regina's voice was rising out of its typical throaty register into high incredulity. "Your _father_ has your power of attorney. He signed your admission papers to the mental ward after your little break with reality."

"You're lying," Belle said, utterly, blissfully fearless. "He didn't, but I understand why you'd want people to think he did when you're—" Her breath hitched; Regina had sold that story and sold it hard, and while Belle didn't believe her father would lock her away against her will, _there were others in town who would_.

"You think you can defy _me_?" Regina said. She took a step closer, trying to use her height to intimidate, but Belle laughed at her.

"Yes," she said. "I do. I think there's a reason you locked me up. I think I frighten you, for what I mean and for who I am, and I think that at the end of the day you're just a lonely, bitter woman desperate to control the entire world. Well, guess what?" Belle took a step closer and now it was Regina who flinched. "You can't control me."

Regina's lips drew back in a brute expression of rage, but Belle laughed at her again; and the Queen whirled around, snatched her son's hand, and began to drag him from the office.

"Madam Mayor, Henry's appointment—" Dr. Hopper said.

"We're canceling," Regina snarled. "Henry, come with me. _Henry!_ "

Henry pulled free and threw himself at Belle; she caught him and squeezed him tight around the shoulders. When he pulled away, he tugged her down to his level, cupped his hands, and whispered in her ear until Regina caught his shoulder and dragged him out the door. Belle stared after him, astonished. Henry grinned and gave her a thumb's-up before Regina gave a final tug and he disappeared.

"That was certainly unusual," Dr. Hopper said mildly, and Belle felt a rush of happy shame that he'd witnessed the confrontation. "The Mayor is usually religious about bringing Henry to his appointments. How are you...?"

"I'm fine," Belle said, and then, caught in a rush of elation, wrapped her arms around Dr. Hopper and passed along Henry's hug. "I'm better than fine!"

"Well," Dr. Hopper said, taking off his glasses and polishing them on the hem of his jacket. "Good. That's very good. Where are you going?"

"I have something to do!" Belle said, and she danced out the door, giddy with revelation and already digging for her phone. Of course, because she needed it it was nowhere to be found; she finally had to stop and prop her canvas bag on a newspaper stand to extract it from under too many books and papers. Emma was second on her speed-dial.

" _Hey, Iz, what's up?_ "

"Emma," Belle said, dodging a cluster of pedestrians and ducking below a banner Sister Astrid was stringing up in front of the Post Office. "Emma, you have to tell me about Henry's fairy tales!"

" _What?_ "

"You said he was obsessed with fairy tales, with that book he showed me. What did you mean?"

Emma groaned. " _Tell me he didn't say anything about Operation Cobra to you._ "

"Operation Cobra?"

" _Nothing, never mind, it isn't important. Uh, fairy tales. He thinks—it's just a fantasy, Dr. Hopper says it's normal—but he thinks we're all characters from his book._ "

Belle whooped, scaring a nearby flock of pigeons into the empty street. Henry _knew_. Henry knew, and here was her real, tangible proof, here was evidence that she no longer had to doubt her two lives.

" _Iz? What's up?_ "

"Just happy," Belle said, letting herself through the street-level door that led to her apartment. "Could you do me a favor?"

" _Sure, you name it._ "

"Next time you see Henry, tell him thanks?"

" _I swear, you two will be inventing your own secret code soon._ "

"And what's Operation Cobra again?"

Emma laughed. " _Point. Sure, I'll pass it along. Lunch tomorrow?_ "

"Sunday? There's something I have to do."

" _You've got it_ ," Emma said. " _Talk to you later._ "

There was a third note taped to Belle's door; this one was handwritten and, while still opaque, far more personal than the other two.

_Miss French,_

_Please see me regarding the update to your lease detailed in the previous letters, copies of which are available at my shop should you no longer possess them. While the basic terms of our agreement have not changed, there are some minor details including extermination services, payment due dates, and maintenance procedures which necessitate a new contract. I require your signature by no later than the 31st of October._

_Yours—_

_Gold_

Belle folded the note and put it in her pocket, and then left before she'd hardly arrived. She'd been planning to do this tomorrow, when she felt less raw and had recaptured some of her sense, but the note seemed like a sign. She stepped into the world feeling entirely like herself and with Henry's whisper caught and held in her mind:

_You did the brave thing._

-

She wasn't truly sure what she would find at Gold's house; but she know she had to go. He lived on the outskirts of town, at the end of a road she'd never travelled. Belle didn't know if she was hoping to find him restored (but if he _was_ Rumpelstiltskin, why hadn't he found her in the dungeon?), if she was hoping to merely find some remnant of who he had been (and wouldn't that complicate matters, if she knew him and he didn't remember her), or if she simply wanted closure on a chapter of her life long finished. The walk took her a quarter of an hour, during which she tried to reason her expectations into something more manageable. Reason did nothing to cure the hope singing through her veins.

Mr. Gold's home was coral, with dramatically steepled roofs that somehow suggested towers. It was set away from the other houses on the lane, as if his neighbors were afraid to build too close lest they one day return home to find their houses had been consumed whole in some unlikely deal. In Belle's experience distance did nothing to lessen the effects of Rumpelstiltskin's personality.

This, she told herself, was absurd, and childish to boot. She marched up the front walk anyway, and rapped three times on his door. What did she think would happen? Did she think that he would take one look at her and _know_ , that he would have explanations for all his ridiculous, moronic behavior, that he would open his arms and she could fall into them? Pointless. Like something in one of the Harlequin paperbacks the library stocked on spinners and bored, lonely housewives checked out by the bagful.

She knocked again. Nobody answered.

Thwarted, Belle whirled around and started circling the house for a low, unguarded window. She should've thought to check his shop first, but now she was here and if she had to break down the door and wait for him in the dark she would. Maybe she'd startle him; he needed a good startling every once in a while.

Then she was back around to the first thought, that this whole idea was ridiculous. He didn't know anything. He'd probably shoot her and call the police, or beat her bloody like he had her father. That was her problem—she always rushed into conflict headlong, reckless to the point of stupidity despite what she thought was a more than generous helping of common sense—

And then she stepped around the corner, into Gold's backyard, and was assaulted by the scent of roses.

His backyard was laid out in the same neat lines as the garden she recalled from elsewhere, and like that other place, the flowers had been given reign to grow as they would. The more exotic colors were missing—no sunset roses here, no silver roses that sparkled when they were dusted with dew, but there was beauty here, and care. The climbers covered the entire back of the house, and had started working their way under the eaves; they'd been trimmed and shaped and bullied into growing around the windows and door, but otherwise mingled freely, scarlet and pale cream and a yellow that almost faded against the coral house until you moved a step to the right and caught the color against the verdigris leaves.

The bushes ringed the lawn to the edge of the woods; these had been planted with no thought to plan or pattern. There were very small roses that reminded Belle of her little flowerpot at home, and roses with enormous round blossoms larger than her closed fist, and roses that started as one color in the center and were a different color entirely by the outer curve of the petals. When Belle parted the leaves of a bush with wicked thorns and velvety flowers a much darker red than blood, she saw that one of the stems had been pinched away. The red roses were planted as part of a trio, with a white bush that displayed only four blooms and a much larger plant that blossomed a delicate lavender.

"Each one has a name, you know," said someone from behind her.

Belle realized she'd stopped breathing, and she forced herself to inhale before letting herself ask, "What's the lavender?"

"Blue Moon," he said.

"The white?"

"Honor."

"And the red?"

"Black Magic," said Rumpelstiltskin.

She turned, then, to look at him in the fading sunlight; he was wearing a charcoal suit with a cerulean shirt and a paisley tie. He seemed entirely human.

"You know," she said.

"Yes."

"And you...knew that I would know?"

"I suspected," he corrected her, "that you might, eventually, discover the truth. Wherever the Queen held you—it took you outside of the curse. For a time."

Belle nodded and began to pick her way across the lawn to him. He had one hand on his cane and the other tucked in his pocket, and was feigning nonchalance with an ease that spoke of centuries of practice, but Belle read his eyes and knew that it was testament to the hold she had on him that he was facing her, like this, no deceit or show of power.

She halted close enough to touch him and stared hard into his face, and the next question tore out of her. " _Why didn't you try to find me?_ "

His gaze snapped away. "Regina told me you were dead. She said—she said that you—"

"That my father," Belle started.

"Yes."

"And...after? When I'd left the hospital?"

He did look at her, then; his eyes were brown rather than gilt, but the difference was only superficial. "Well, dearest. It seemed to me that you should be free to make your own choice."

"Oh," Belle said, and blinked, and touched the fingers of her right hand to her lips.

"Belle—"

"You threw me out and you harmed my father," Belle said.

He sighed. "Not charges I can deny."

"I still haven't forgiven you for that. You don't get another chance after this one, do you understand?"

"Not at all," he said.

"And you're going to answer all my questions," she added. "I have a lot of questions, I hope you have enough tea to last while you provide many thorough explanations."

"Belle?"

"You'd better kiss me now, Rumpelstiltskin," Belle told him. "I'm not going to wait around forever."

"With an invitation like that," he said, one corner of his mouth curling up crookedly. Belle, who couldn't wait any longer, flung herself at him; and he opened his arms and caught her, bad knee and all.

-

A week before, a new map had appeared in the first appendix of Henry's book, and after he returned home from his latest session with Dr. Hopper he hurried to his room to look at it. The map changed on an hourly basis; roads lengthened or vanished, new locations appeared where there had been forest before, and place names changed and then changed back with no rhyme or warning. There were a few markers that stayed constant—Granny's Inn, and the Storybrooke Library, and the Abbey—but Henry took the map's mutable nature as proof that the curse was weakening.

Today there was only one change on the map. Henry didn't notice it at first, but as he traced Main Street with his finger from the far right border of the page, through downtown, and over the crease where the book's pages joined, he saw that the house all alone at the edge of the woods was called something new. Yesterday the small, fine ink drawing of a two-story home with high peaks had been labeled _Mr. Gold's Residence_.

Now, it bore a different name: _Dragon's Den_.


	2. The Alchemist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rumpelstiltskin plays his little games.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd originally intended to post this as a separate story, but enough people are tracking the first part that I decided it'd work just as well as a new chapter. :) References are listed (er, will be listed) [here](http://standardclocks.tumblr.com/tagged/references). Thanks as always to Odyle for her patience and perspicacity!

He made her tea first.

After her unprompted revelation in his rose garden, he'd barely been able to drag his eyes away from her; they'd stumbled inside with fingers still tangled together, and even though he'd offered her a chair at his oak slab of a kitchen table, she hadn't seemed able to pull herself away from his side. Five feet seemed an unfathomable distance now that she'd returned to him.

He managed to wrest himself away long enough to heat the kettle and measure out the tea leaves; Belle tried to help, but he'd chased her away, aware that if this new start was to continue on an even keel they'd have to abandon a good deal of their habits of old. He had to carry the teapot and the sugar bowl and the cups to the table one at a time. His leg was sending a fierce ache up through nerve and bones, affirming his long suspicion that the inflammation was in part psychosomatic. Unfortunately, psychiatry could do nothing for the bone shards and scar tissue that twisted through and around his knee.

Belle smiled when he remembered how she took her tea—one sugar, black—and again when he dragged the second chair around the table so they were sitting beside each other instead of at opposing ends. 

"Now?" she said.

"Now," said Rumpelstiltskin, and then he told her everything. 

He started at the beginning, with a poor man off to war, and then he told her about his wife; he told her about Bae, about his boy and how he'd been lost, in no small part through Rumpelstiltskin's own cowardice; he told her about the Dark One, and the Blue Fairy, and then doubled back to tell her about Hook; he told her how he acquired his castle, and how men first came to him to trade for their hearts' desire; he told her about long years of fruitless study and how he'd planted the seeds of the Curse long before she'd been born; he told her of years of patient, careful cultivation, of how he'd watered that seed and coaxed it to light; he told her about Regina, Queen, and about Snow White and Prince James, and how Emma and her son had come to be; and then he told her his regrets, and what he feared; and finally there was only one thing left to tell her.

"I love you," he said, because it needed saying.

"And I love you," she said, and then sniffled loudly and rubbed her tears away. He couldn't think less of her for it, when his own eyes were wet. "You are the most—trying, infuriating— _ridiculous_ man, but I love you, saints only know why."

"Yes, well," he said, and felt as ridiculous as she believed him to be, sitting there with his hand hovering over her back while she scrubbed furiously at her face, "we all have our burdens to bear."

That earned him a third, somewhat more watery smile. He let his hand settle, just briefly, between the wings of her shoulderblades, and then he took an orange from the bowl on the table and began to peel it, for something to do with his hands.

Belle reached for her cup of tea and made a face when her fingers found it cold. "Ugh," she said. "No, don't get up, I think I can manage to boil water."

"You shouldn't feel—"

"We'll do it in turns," she said, firmly.

"Fair enough," he conceded. He sectioned his orange and ate it while she bustled around, arranging teaspoons and familiarizing herself with the contents of his cupboards. She seemed frustrated with the disarray, but, if he was reading her correctly, determined not to scold him during their reunion. Once, a long time ago, he'd wondered that he'd taken a jewel for his maid who'd then revealed herself to be more thorough and practical than the king's own steward.

"Let's have it," he said.

"I have no idea what you mean," she said, stabbing at the buttons on his electric kettle.

"Then—"

"Why aren't your mugs all in the same place?" she burst out. "And you have rags and—god only know what this is, it smells awful—stuck with your silver!"

"I know where everything is, dearie. Why waste the time rearranging it?"

"Because I don't," she said, precisely as he hoped she would. This was an old argument, and one that proved that everything that had once passed between them need not be cut away to make room for new growth. "Here. Drink your tea."

"You probably have books in your cabinets, the size of that flat—ah," he said, catching her guilty twitch. "You do, don't you?"

"Maybe," Belle said, biting her full lower lip, but the gleam in her eyes gave her away. It was strange to see her in foreign clothing, more so in the long-familiar kitchen. This house wasn't home, but in three decades he'd grown used to its bulk. 

"Your turn," he said. "It seems you have a story of your own, dearie. The Queen wouldn't have left you alone all those months only to snatch you up later if you hadn't done something to offend her. Something more than your association with me, even."

"Oh yes," Belle said. "She has plenty of reasons to hate me, even if she doesn't know all of them. But first—do you have somewhere more comfortable to sit?"

"I can do better than that," he said. "You don't mind carrying the tray?"

"My pleasure," she said, and followed him down the hall to a room that he knew at first glance seemed forbidding, but the candles he lit revealed thick Persian rugs piled three deep on the floor and a fire already laid in the grate. The walls were draped with the tapestries he'd appreciated too much to take to his shop—Belle had always seemed taken by the one with the unicorn—and a wingback chair and a double sofa were pulled close to the hearth. His workroom, in most ways a twin to the shop's back room, was in the basement, but this was where he came to drink, and sometimes just to stare into the fire and think as he tried to absorb some of its warmth.

Belle set the tea tray on the floor for convenience and curled on the sofa, her feet tucked underneath her. Rumpelstiltskin shed his jacket and lit the fire before joining her; he did his best to be subtle about sitting closer to her than was strictly necessary and failed miserably. He used to pride himself on subtlety.

"She locked me up," Belle started. "Regina. Not in the hospital, in her castle. It was primarily to punish you, but I didn't sit around to mold after you turned me away."

"What about Avonlea?" he said, his curiosity jumping ahead of his remorse. 

"I told you once that I wanted to see the world." She smiled a fourth time and nudged his thigh with her toe. "I've only ever really wanted two things, and since I was denied the second, I thought I should have the first."

"And how did you find the world?"

"Vast," she said. "Wonderful. And lonely."

Her tale would've made a fine entry into any book of fairy stories; it was full of intrigue and danger (too much danger, to his mind), and more than one situation that she'd escaped only through her quick wit. She told him about meeting Snow White—and her own encounter with the Blue Fairy—and how, with her steady hands and her eye for detail, she'd started making maps. "I only did it to help myself at first," she said, "but then I found out that people would pay an awful lot for an accurate map, and even more if I told them what I'd heard down the road."

"A professional gossip?"

"I used to like to think of myself as a spy, although that might be more accurate. Hired observer?"

"Cartographer," he suggested.

"That's better." She edged a little closer. The fire was crackling now, sparks leaping up the chimney, but he doubted she was looking for heat. After a moment of consideration, he tamped down his doubts and held out one of his arms; she curled into him almost immediately, managing to dig the point of her chin into his armpit and leaving him with a mouthful of thick hair as she burrowed against him. He didn't mind in the least.

She finished by telling him of her awakening in Storybrooke, of how she'd opened her eyes one day with more memories than she could decipher and of how, shortly after, the door of her cell had swung open with no cause. "That was you, though, I know now."

"Was it?" He'd finished his tale with the Queen casting the Curse.

"Of course it was. You'll have to tell me how you found out I was alive."

"That honor, my dear, belongs to a disreputable figure by the name of Jefferson."

"Paige's father?"

"The same," he said. "He had been separated from his daughter; when he saw that the Mayor was keeping a hidden prisoner, he brought the information to me hoping to make a deal. My price was the infiltration of the hospital. I didn't believe him at the start, but when I saw you..."

"At the flower shop!" she said. "I forgot. You came in to collect the rent and left without it."

"That is not a policy I make a habit of forgoing."

"Oh yes," she said. "Because clearly what you need is more gold."

"Clearly what I need," he said, pressing a kiss to her forehead, "is for someone to laugh at me for attempting to uphold my end of a contract. How did I live without that?"

"Poorly," Belle said. "And that, unfortunately, leaves only one question: What do we do now?"

"Too much to ask you to turn back time and play the meek librarian again, I gather." He realized that he was stroking her hair, idly picking apart the braid in which she customarily bound it. 

"I wouldn't take it back even if you asked," she admitted. "Maybe if you asked _nicely_?"

"I can be nice—"

She pulled away just enough to stare him down before resuming her post against his shoulder. "Maybe to me, or your son. I think you can be good, though."

"I'll leave the semantics to you," he said, and she snorted, presumably in disbelief. "So. You've set yourself against the Mayor publicly. The Mayor's minions and the Blue Fairy show no signs of remembering the old world, which removes them from the larger battleground, if not as everyday nuisances. For the time being the Mayor believes I'm willing to play her game, which is a tenuous advantage at best."

"And me?" Belle said. 

"She assumes I've lost interest in you," Rumpelstiltskin said. "That, or she thinks you've scorned me."

"Can we use that?"

He hated to admit otherwise, but the truth was that for all his machinations, he was horrible at hiding how he felt about her. It was the same, he suspected, with his son; very few things could break his composure, but those two remained dangerously obvious weaknesses. He'd fallen apart when that silly little cup had gone missing. He wasn't going to fool himself into thinking he'd be able to keep his eyes away from her in public, not when he'd struggled to do so when she hadn't known him from Adam, and that made him, still, the better chess player. Regina was as blind to her faults as any opponent could wish.

"I wouldn't know how," he said. "What do you suggest? That you go back to your life, and I to mine, and we meet in back alleys or not at all?"

"I'm not giving you up again. You're stuck with me." Belle twisted until she was on her back with her head resting in his lap, and with a little more contortion she managed to nab her teacup and bring it to rest on her chest, where it tilted alarmingly as she frowned in thought. "Unless you do something unforgivably stupid. You can't take revenge on Regina, not like you want to." He blue, blue eyes snapped up to his. "Promise me."

"That I won't kill her?"

"That you won't harm her for—for locking me away. I know you're playing her now, but you've gotten what you need from her. We're here, in the same world as Baelfire. I couldn't stand it if you tortured someone on my behalf."

He let his mind fall away, to the anger that gnawed at him ceaselessly. "She's let me close to her. I wouldn't need to kill her—"

"Rumpelstiltskin, _promise me_."

"Yes," he said, and sighed. "Very well. I promise."

"Good. Thank you. Anyway, she isn't the problem. She's cornered and desperate, but she's transparent. When Emma breaks the curse—"

" _If_."

"Trust me," Belle said, as if he could do anything else. "I know Emma."

"If I'm to break off relations with the Queen—"

Belle jerked upright; only his anticipation saved the teacup. "Have you been—?"

"What, dear?" he said, tipping the saucer back into the cup. This was far from his finest set of china, but he didn't want to spend the evening mopping up spills all over the rugs.

"Sleeping with her," Belle said, furiously.

His head jerked up. "What? Why in seven hells would I...?"

"I wouldn't know, would I!" Belle's chin was up and her voice was too loud; she was behaving completely irrationally, completely unlike herself...because, he realized with a spark of shock, she was envious.

"Sweetheart," he said. "No. Hey, now, look at me." He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand until her flush started to fade. "There's no one but you. There hasn't been...and even when there was, it wasn't _you_."

"I—" Belle let her lids fall shut and leaned into his hand. "Sorry, that was absurd. When you said 'relations' my mind jumped to—something she said."

"Trying to play games with you, no doubt. No, dearest, all I meant is that she's started to take me into her confidence. She doesn't trust me entirely, but she likes having someone around who knows. Someone who can appreciate her scheming."

"An audience."

"Exactly that. And while we may not need her, it could be deadly to let her run off unchecked."

"You're too cautious," Belle said, but she tucked herself against him again all the same. He almost laughed when she nudged her head against his hand until he resumed stroking her hair; she was like a persistent cat, with all those warm, dense limbs draped every which way.

"You aren't cautious enough."

"We're at back alleys again. I don't like it. Secret relationships, those never end well in the stories."

"I don't either," he said, "and there's not a chance the Mayor could see us together and not realize I have it in for her. Dense woman. She used to show some potential as a sorceress, but then she squandered all of it on pointless vengeance."

Belle cleared her throat.

"I said her vengeance was pointless, dearie, not all vengeance."

"I thought you were leaving the semantics to me. No, don't make that face. I know I don't have to tell you not to underestimate her. She cast the Curse, didn't she?"

"By design," Rumpelstiltskin said. "But she hid you away from me. She did a poor job on your memories, though."

"The second set?"

"All false. You spent twenty-seven years with no memories at all. She gave you the new ones too late, too long after the Curse took hold, and while she has some reserve of magic, her spells lack finesse." He tapped the bridge of her nose. "That would be why you remember both lives."

"Too late..." Belle mused. "She was acting out of desperation again. Emma?"

"As you say."

"No secrets," Belle said. "I'm sick of secrets and shadows. Let's let her know. Let's parade it in front of her."

"There are other considerations. Your memories, for instance—that's one secret we should keep, and for as long as possible. And then there's your reputation."

"My...what?"

"I'm not well-liked in town, dearie."

He didn't expect her to burst out laughing. "Neither am I. Emma and Mary Margaret like me well enough, but most people only tolerate me because I watch their children for free. They think I'm so disturbed my own father had me locked away. I might drag _your_ name through the mud."

"Somehow I think I'll manage."

"What was it you said? We all have our burdens to bear. You more than most."

"You aren't among those burdens. Belle..."

They were quiet for some time, studying each other. Rumpelstiltskin drank her in—the sight of her, of course, for she was as lovely as ever, but more than that the presence of her, and the sheer luxurious pleasure of having such an agile partner in plotting. 

"No more decisions tonight," Belle said. "We don't have to hide; that's enough, I think."

"Is it, now?"

"It is. I'm exhausted."

"Mmm," he said, laying his head back against the sofa. He'd stopped moving his hand; instead, his fingers were simply woven through her hair. The reality of her was finally beginning to settle over him, and for the first time in too many years he felt warmed from the inside by a small, unquenchable ember wholly his own. It made his mind drift to the stories that in this world were called fairy tales; whatever whim of the universe that caused histories of a foreign land to be told to children as fables even he didn't know, although there was little chance fairies weren't the culprits. In the oldest retelling he'd heard of his own great love, Beast had asked the Beauty every night if she would marry him, and every night she'd said no—until the night she didn't. That Beast bore very little resemblance to Rumpelstiltskin other than the nature of their circumstances; Rumpelstiltskin was, after all, not a decent man sewn into the skin of a monster but rather a monster all the way through; but tonight he felt a kinship for the poor fellow. What he felt at having Belle with him was the same measure as the satisfaction that Beast must have felt when Beauty assented to be his wife.

"What are you thinking?" Belle said.

"Nothing much, love. Just a story an old woman once told."

"Was it a good story?"

"I couldn't say."

"Did it have true love and high adventure?"

He grunted. "I suppose it did, at that."

"Then it's a good story. You'll have to tell it to me sometime."

"Time enough for that later," he said, and then, because she made him dare what he shouldn't, asked, "Will you stay?"

She blinked sleepily at him. "Do you want me to stay?"

"Oh yes," he said, in a low voice. "I very much want that."

"Then good luck getting rid of me, Rumpelstiltskin," said Belle.

-

One night turned into two, and two to three. He spent the whole weekend cocooned with her in their own sphere of existence. She dodged calls from her friends and he from his business associates, and they spent their hours in bliss, cooking and exploring his house—there were rooms that he'd opened once and then left to gather dust—and sitting in his garden. They went to bed, and that was more glorious that he'd dreamed; but mostly they talked. Belle was expansive and surprising and came at the world from such a different tack that he could listen to her for the rest of his natural lifespan and not once feel the itch of boredom. There was a new freedom, too, in spilling his secrets. Even—before, he'd been a reticent man.

On Sunday evening, they managed to persuade one another to separate. "Three days closed without any notice is three too many, with my hearing next month," Belle said. "I'm going to spend all day sorting through returns."

"When can I see you again?" he said against her mouth.

When she laughed, her breath huffed against his chin in little warm clouds. "Dinner?"

"Lunch," he decided, and kissed her.

"Mmf—I could stay another night."

"And go to work dressed in one of my suits?"

"Who gave you permission to be the sensible one?"

He grinned and then, thrilled when she let out a stunned shriek, spun her out and back in and dipped her. She was laughing again, mirthful and uncontrolled and completely unlike the laugh a noblewoman should have; he fell in love with her all over again every time he looked at her, every time he heard that laugh.

"This is ludicrous," Belle said, but her hands came up to clasp him behind the neck despite her protests. "There's far too much to worry about for me to be this happy."

"It'll wear off soon enough, dearie." He pressed another swift, hard kiss to her lips and then hauled her upright, unable to hold the dip longer. 

"But not, I think, entirely."

"Not entirely," he agreed, aware that he looked like a giddy fool himself. If Sheriff Swan saw him now, her badge would pop off in shock. He hadn't shaved in days and his suits had long been discarded; he thought his hair was sticking up in back but didn't care enough to check. That apathy was dangerous. Image was as much a weapon as a dagger.

"Go," he said. "I'll see you at lunch."

"Too long," she said, and kissed him, and kissed him again as he backed her towards the door. She kissed him when he handed her her shoes, and after he balanced her while she put them on, and for smoothing her hair so she looked marginally less mauled. When she reached for the doorknob, he dragged her back and kissed her once more.

He'd done few things more difficult than closing the door on her back. At least there wasn't a need to sneak her home; they'd decided against that unfavorable course of action, although Rumpelstiltskin was hard-pressed to surrender any advantage to the Mayor's devices.

He slept long and soundly that night, and passed the morning re-arming himself. Curse or no, he had a role to play, and he played it well; if Storybrooke's citizens chose to cast him as the town villain—well, he could hardly fault them, could he? The only point that stuck in his crow was Regina's escape. He'd been content to leave her alone after she'd served his ends, uncaring if she gutted Snow White or withered away under her own torrid agony, but now...now there would be a reckoning. There was his promise to Belle, but surely even she could understand that there must be some consequence to the Mayor's actions, some punishment fitting for the woman who'd stolen his love and locked her away...

At eight on the nose he unlocked the shop's front door, flipped the open sign, and drew the curtains back from the windows. At eight-oh-three Sheriff Swan threw open the same door hard enough that the glass rattled in the panes. 

"Sheriff, I hate to resort to such tired advice, but if you break my inventory, you'll be buying my inventory."

"Where's Iz?" the Sheriff demanded. She'd barreled at him with all the delicacy of a charging bull, and now she stood with her head lowered and her nostrils flaring; he almost fancied he could see steam coming from her ears. 

"Iz what?" he asked, because he liked pushing her. She was amusing, the Sheriff, even, like her father, almost tolerable.

"Iz what—Iz _French_ , the librarian. Don't play coy, I know she went to see you last week and then she just"—the Sheriff smacked his counter—"up and vanishes like that? Where the hell is she?"

"It's a far stretch, I'll admit, but have you tried the library?"

"Have I tried the—you," Sheriff Swan said, "you—you! I swear, damn it—don't go anywhere?"

"Why ever not?"

"You're a suspect," she said. "I'll be back, just—stay!"

"Don't slam the door on your way out, please," he said, mildly.

"Stay _put_ ," the Sheriff said again, apparently under the mistaken impressions that Gold, unlike the rest of Storybrooke's denizens, couldn't understand simple instructions and that he cared enough to do as she said.

"Thank you, come again!" he called to her retreating back. She made a rude gesture that he caught through the front windows. The rest of his morning was quiet, save one small but distasteful business transaction; he presumed that Sheriff Swan had found Belle safe and intact at her workplace. At half-past twelve he gathered a stack of his current projects—these he divided into three categories: pertaining to his assets in Storybrooke, pertaining to Bae and the Curse, and his own hobbyist's notes—slipped it into his briefcase, and drove the four blocks to the library.

The place was nearly empty. Belle was helping a slip of a child select her reading material while the mother stood just inside, arms crossed and mouth compressed to a tight line. Ah. There was the stigma Belle had mentioned.

"Good afternoon, Ms. Marling," he said. "I trust your sister is well?"

The woman flinched; there had been a fuss some months ago, when her sister and husband had absconded together quite publicly and then had the nerve to sue for custody of the children. There were two, both girls. He'd rub salt in that wound until she screamed for the way she looked at Belle, as though Belle were below her, as though Belle were a disease, as if madness was catching.

"Oh!" Belle said, before the woman could do more than grimace. "Rum—Mr. Gold. Just a moment, Poppy's almost finished picking out a book for her report." Poppy beamed, all gap-toothed sunshine that reminded him very much of how Bae had smiled at that age. Belle was, if not a favorite of Storybrooke's parents, clearly a hit with their children. The child had snatched a handful of Belle's skirt and was using it to tow Belle around, darting from one display to the next as she struggled to make up her mind.

Finally the little thing tugged Belle to the front desk, where she stood on tiptoe to push her two storybooks over the counter. She then looked inquiringly at her mother; the mother frowned and began to dig in her purse, but Belle shook her head. 

"No, it's fine, Ms. Marling. I know who you are, I can look up your record without Poppy's card."

"Good," the woman said. Her quest completed, the child thanked Belle and scampered out the door, but since the mother had displayed no such grace Rumpelstiltskin made it a point to sneer at her as she brushed past him—clearly uncomfortable with the contact—and away. He turned back to find Belle watching him thoughtfully, the furrow in her brow demonstrating her unease, and he felt suddenly ashamed. It was a feeling he hadn't had in years.

"I'm going to overlook you being rude to one of my patrons this time, because I understand your intentions," Belle said. "I won't do so in the future."

"She had no right to look at you—"

"She had every right. People can look at other people however they please. She may not have been polite, or even decent, but you can't tear into someone because you think they were rude to me."

"I don't see why not," he grumbled.

"Because you're a curmudgeon," Belle said, but she said it more fondly that she might've. "I'm not asking you to be nice, but at least don't run my customers away? I don't have any to spare."

He sighed and set the briefcase on her desk. "You drive a hard bargain, dearie. Very well, I'll not chase anyone out of your library for reasons other than bodily harm...or making you cry."

Belle laughed. "If one of these idiots can make me cry, I'll let you chase them away." She came around the counter and stepped into him, tilting her face up expectantly for a kiss. He indulged her, and then himself, and by the time they broke away they were both chasing their breaths.

"You look lovely," he said. She did, dressed in a long heather skirt in some light knit that fell to the tops of her boots and a sweater the color of fresh cream. Astonishingly, she blushed, from shyness rather than good humor or exertion.

"Thanks. You look lovely too."

"Well then, it's glad to know the time I spent coordinating the ensemble paid off. Wouldn't do to have my tenants seeing me unlovely," he drawled.

She flashed her teeth at him. "You think I'm teasing, but I'm not."

"I couldn't give two cents if you're teasing as long as you—" he started, but she anticipated him with another kiss.

After some time, she drew away and asked, "Lunch?"

"Yeah," he said. "Wherever you like."

"Let's get something delivered. I don't feel like going out."

"You don't eat at the restaurants anyway," he said, still chasing her lips. She tasted like nothing so fanciful as cinnamon or oranges; instead, her mouth was was warm and wet, her lips tinted an over-ripe red. 

"How do you know that?"

He realized he'd spoken without thinking first and crossed his hands over his cane automatically. "It's my business to know everything."

"Please," Belle said. "Where do I buy my groceries?"

"At the Farmer's Market, when it's open, or through the Co-Op."

"Where do I go to think?"

"The wharf."

"What kind of shampoo do I use?"

"I don't know, dearie, it isn't as if I'm hiding in your shower. Probably whatever's cheapest," he said, and when her eyes softened found he didn't mind that he'd outed himself.

"You paid attention to me."

"Could hardly do anything but," he admitted.

"I bet you don't know where Mary Margaret buys her groceries."

"If Mary Margaret Blanchard rode a horse down the streets without a stitch of clothing on her person," he retorted, "it wouldn't make a whit of difference to me."

She tucked her arm through his and guided him 'round the outside of the stacks and to her office, which abutted the building's rear wall and therefore afforded a certain amount of quiet. "She's so different from Snow," Belle said. "I knew her before, you know, and she was almost entirely unlike Mary Margaret."

"I didn't, but yes, she is. The Curse filled in the details on its own, and magic is subject to its own whims, but what demon decided to make Snow White meek is having fun at her expense." Belle pushed him into her desk chair and settled herself on the desk. Within a few seconds she'd kicked off her shoes and settled her feet in his lap.

"And that leads to a question," Belle said. "What am I to call you?"

Rumpelstiltskin opened his mouth—

"In public," she amended.

He smirked at her.

"Oh, shove it. If you call me 'Belle' nobody will think it's strange—"

"Except Regina."

"Fine, then, except Regina, but 'Rumpelstiltskin' isn't...it's certainly...what _is_ your given name here?"

He tucked her hair behind her ear, bent forward, and whispered it to her.

"Really?" she said.

He nodded.

"I suppose there is something to be said for formality," she said, doubtfully.

"There's no harm in remaining Mr. Gold and Miss French. In public."

"Ms. French," Belle said.

"Ms. French, then. My apologies, love, I should've known a bluestocking would require something more modern."

Belle did something wicked involving her feet and his lap.

"...Are we skipping lunch?"

She huffed and stilled. "No, we aren't. I'm hungry. Hold on, I have..."

After rummaging she managed to produce a collection of take-out menus. Rumpelstiltskin, who cared little for food beyond having enough of it, told her to choose, and thirty minutes later they were ensconced comfortably at her desk with two bowls of soup and a platter of cold sandwiches. She filled him in on what specifics of her life in Storybrooke he hadn't managed to glean, which meant they mostly discussed the library's stock (too much Patterson), the library's budget (in all ways limited), the library's programming (she wished her adult programs could be as successful as the children's activities), and Emma Swan.

Rumpelstiltskin's thoughts on true love's daughter were many. She was, at first, a tool, the lost child of an overbearing woman and a merely tolerable man who shared a love strong enough to shake worlds. Then she'd been a frustration, if one amusing for her ability to thwart Regina, and only recently had she won his respect. She had a good head, calm, collected, and skeptical, and a heart strong enough to weather the coming storms. He wasn't surprised that of all the souls in Storybrooke Belle had befriended Sheriff Swan.

"...didn't have enough time to interrogate me, but she'll be back. I'm not looking forward to that argument, but I am going to enjoy her face when I tell her," Belle was saying.

He picked apart his sandwich and used the hilt of his soup spoon to scrape away the mayonnaise. "You think she'll try to dissuade you?"

"Absolutely," Belle said. "She has to be the most overprotective"—she stopped, squinted at him, and then continued—"the second-most overprotective person I've know. Have you ever had a friend who was convinced that they knew better than you?"

From anyone else that question would've meant _Have you ever had a friend_ , but Belle was without guile. He'd had few enough acquaintances he'd let close, but there was one, once, long ago, whom he'd counted as a friend. The whole thing was ruined in a knot of betrayal—sorcerers were always betraying each other—but she'd been more than smug enough to give the Sheriff a run for her money.

"I have, and she was a far sight more narcissistic than your Sheriff."

"I wouldn't call Emma a narcissist," Belle said.

"No. She doesn't keep a pet unicorn, either, not to my knowledge, although I imagine that boy of hers would be delighted if she did."

"Henry's too smart for his own good."

"He's not the only one," Rumpelstiltskin said, dangerously, but Belle smiled at him.

"You like how clever I am."

He had no retort for that, because she was, as ever, right.

-

They fell into a routine so rapidly that he wondered if a place hadn't been carved in Storybrooke for her since the beginning. Mornings they rose early, took a long breakfast, and then parted well before the rest of the town had stirred. They met for lunch at his place of business or hers, and sometimes managed to return to work in the afternoon, and sometimes did not. The evenings and nights they spent at her apartment, or, more often, his house—her bed was so narrow and her bedroom so crammed with books that there was scarcely room for another person.

Neither of them were inclined to public displays, so for a brief, blissful period they were unhassled by the world's concerns. Belle prepared for her hearing and he helped her, going over her contract and helping her construct a counter-argument, but Regina stayed clear of them, perhaps biding her time but more likely aware of his anger and what was coming. The Sheriff stared at him suspiciously when their paths crossed, but that was neither unprecedented nor without cause. He supposed he'd have to speak to her eventually, and to Belle's fool father, but he was long practiced at reading the heavens and knew what was coming better than Regina. This tempest was of his own making, after all.

Life was not without its share of guilt. There was a wretchedness in feeling happy every time Belle walked into the room, every time she set her hand against his shoulder or stood close enough that he could catch the scent of her hair, and a dread that she would be taken from him. Nothing good was made to last, in Rumpelstiltskin's experience; endings were never happy, not really.

Regina's boy brought his shame and guilt to the fore. Henry had made a habit of peeping into his shop every fortnight or so, no doubt drawn by the appeal of his mother's disapproval. He wasn't a foolhardy child, but he did find the unknown alluring, and Rumpelstiltskin was as unknowable a character as any in his book or outside of it. His most recent visit occurred shortly before Rumpelstiltskin was due to meet with Belle; Henry had worked up the nerve to come inside, where he loitered just inside the door with his hands hidden in his coat pockets and his eyes darting from shelf to shelf as he pretended to browse the wares.

"Hello, Henry," Rumpelstiltskin said.

The boy jumped, but, to give him credit, didn't try to hide his startled reaction. "Mr. Gold! Hi."

"Does your mother know you're here?"

Henry backed up a step, but then his chin came up and he squared his slim shoulders. "Why do you care?"

Rumpelstiltskin chuckled. "You make a fair point, Mr. Mills, as you'll find that I don't, but should either of your esteemed parents cause a fuss in my store, I won't be responsible for the ruined merchandise."

"Emma doesn't know I'm here, and Mom doesn't..."

"Doesn't what?"

"I was going to say that she doesn't care, but I'm not sure that's true. She's been trying to spend more time with me. It's weird."

Rumpelstiltskin picked up his stained rag and went back to buffing the antique bridle he'd dredged up from storage. It was a fine thing, well-crafted but not the ornate tack of nobility, and needed only a bit of oiling to set it back to rights. "Oh?" he said, and with that word managed to make it clear that he was more interested in his work than whatever troubles plagued his young customer.

"She actually apologized the other day when I told her I wanted to run away with Emma." The boy took a handful of steps closer, camaraderie overtaking his caution. "She's never apologized to me before."

"If there's one thing I've learned, it's that nothing with the Mayor is ever as it appears."

"Emma's not like that," Henry said.

"Sheriff Swan wouldn't know subterfuge if it bit her on the arse," Rumpelstiltskin said. The dry observation amused Henry; he grinned and his right hand emerged from his pocket to scratch the back of his head in a bashful, genuine gesture. "Better hope they never put their heads together, or you'll never visit the town pawn broker again."

"I don't think they like each other very much."

Rumpelstiltskin leaned over the counter, paused a beat, and then confided, in a sibilant voice he hadn't used for decades, "I don't think so, either." He straightened. "Now. Best you run along, unless you're planning on making a purchase."

Henry opened his fist to reveal a wad of dollar bills. "I was kind of hoping to buy something, actually. Emma's birthday is soon, but I'm not sure what to get her."

"Ah," Rumpelstiltskin said, and exchanged one rag for another as he worked a tricky fold of leather. "Looking for something that says 'I don't blame you for abandoning me, even if my mother is an evil witch,' are you? There's no greeting card for that, but you might try the florist's down the street."

Henry took those last few steps forward and starting flattening his bills on the counter scant inches from where Rumpelstiltskin was working. "You aren't as bad as Mom and Emma say."

"Aren't I?"

"No," Henry decided, and began laboriously counting and then recounting his fortune. "I don't think you are. You're funny. Do you have any mugs?"

"I have everything, lad, and what I don't have I can make, and what I can't make I can find. If it's a mug you want, you'll find one behind the casket at the far end, there."

"Thanks," Henry said. "How much are they?"

"I'll tell you what—I'll make you a deal."

The boy's money disappeared into his pocket with one of the quickest sleights-of-hand Rumpelstiltskin had ever seen. "I'm pretty sure I shouldn't make any deals with you."

"Ah, but this deal's harmless. I'll give you a mug for the Sheriff, and you come back and visit me next week."

"That's all? I don't have to tell you anything?" Henry's expression narrowed. "You aren't trying to get me to spy on anyone, are you?"

"That's all."

"Are you going to kidnap me? Because I don't think I'd like being kidnapped very much."

"No kidnapping, you have my word." For the first time, Rumpelstiltskin hesitated; one more way to keep an eye on the boy, who was as surely a nexus of power as his mother, had seemed like an intelligent move, but if he promised too much there'd be questions. "I'll not harm you while you're in my shop."

"Okay," Henry said. "The mugs are over there?"

"Indeed they are. Take two," Rumpelstiltskin said, feeling generous. Belle would be pleased with him, if nothing else. She worried about Henry, who'd survived under Regina's roof for longer than anyone but Belle herself. If he played the game with care, he might even press the boy into revealing one or two things from that remarkable book of his. Rumpelstiltskin had had no hand in the book; it was one of the very few things about his own curse that had come as a surprise.

Henry opened the cabinet and began lining the odd assortment of glassware up on the counter, wiping the dust from each piece with his sleeve as he went. Without fanfare, Rumpelstiltskin took one of his cleaner rags and dangled it from his fingers; it attracted Henry's attention and the boy snatched it from him with half a mind and returned to his task, apparently bent on examining every hairline crack on every mug before making his decision.

Rumpelstiltskin heard the whisper of the curtain from the back room because he was listening for it, as attentively as a hound listened for its master—which was, he reflected with a touch of scorn, perhaps too apt a comparison. Her arms slid around his waist, and her head came to rest between his shoulders; she must have turned her head to the side, because he could feel the silky mass of her hair moving against his back through the fabric his shirt.

He walked his fingers from her elbow up to her wrist and then slid his hands over hers. He could feel her giggle as she shook against him; she was sensitive to the lightest touch—at least to his lightest touch, a realization that cause him more pride than agony. 

"Are you sure I can have two?" Belle froze at Henry's voice. "That way Emma could have one at home and one at her office," Henry continued, "even though one of them would probably end up in her car—Iz?" 

Belle's hands fell away from his sides and resettled against his spine; she had to rise up on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder. "Hi, Henry."

Henry's eyes were near to bugging out of his head. Rumpelstiltskin had the brief, whimsical thought that he might catch them as they rolled away and add them to a brew, although there weren't many potions that called for eye of boy. He'd been out of that business for far too long; Mal would've been ashamed.

"What are you—are you—you aren't—?" 

Belle laughed. "I'm here to see Mr. Gold, and I am—that is, we are." She pecked him on the cheek and then went to join Henry, who now looked at Rumpelstiltskin with one eye scrunched shut and his head tilted at a quizzical angle familiar to any cat.

"I knew you couldn't be that bad," Henry finally declared.

"Oh, he really is," Belle said. "But not in the ways everyone thinks. Are you here to pick out a gift for Emma?"

"I thought she might want a mug that she doesn't have to use a chisel to clean."

Belle picked up the first cup in line, a squat, yellowing thing large enough to hold a grapefruit. "Good idea. Sometimes I wonder if she only has the one cup."

The boy cast a sideways glance at Rumpelstiltskin, who took that as his cue to resume his occupation with the oil. 

"She broke the rest," Henry whispered, at a volume only slightly less audible than his usual speaking voice. "She said not to tell anyone. She also can't figure out how to work the oven, but she pretends she doesn't like cookies so Miss Blanchard doesn't feel sad that Emma never bakes for her."

Rumpelstiltskin wondered if the boy had considered penning a gossip column for _The Daily Mirror_. It'd be the most accurate source of news in the whole paper by a far cry.

"That sounds like Emma," Belle said, also in a stage-whisper.

"Iz, are you really dating Mr. Gold?"

"I really am. It's actually a little ways past dating. Can you keep a secret?"

"Yes! But not if it hurts anyone."

"It won't," Belle promised. "We're actually a couple."

There was a beat of silence as Henry considered this information, and then he said, "Have you told Emma?"

"Not...exactly," Belle said.

"Iz! You have to tell Emma. She's your best friend."

Belle managed to beam and look stricken at the same time. "I'll tell her, I swear it. I'm only a little..."

"Scared?"

"Scared," Belle said. "Emma's opinion is important to me, and I don't think she'll like what I have to tell her, at least at first. I don't want her to be mad at me, but she's going to be mad when she realizes she can't change my mind."

"You should make her hot chocolate," Henry advised, "and then leave her alone for a couple of days. Sometimes Emma needs time to think about stuff."

"You've noticed that too, huh?"

"Have I ever," said Henry.

Once the boy had trotted off, box with its padded contents clutched to his chest, Belle tucked her hands behind her skirt and turned to him with a smirk.

"That was kind of you," she said.

"It was practical," he returned. "He's as good an indicator of the Mayor's mood as any."

She bit her lip—not that it helped to contain her smile—and swayed as she walked toward him. "I think you like him."

"I don't like anyone."

"You like me," she said.

"An outrageous accusation." He held his face still for as long as he could. "Under pressure I might admit that I don't not like you."

"Then you admit it!"

"I admit nothing—"

"Really?" Belle said. "Because that sounded like an admission of guilt to me."

"Am I being interrogated now?"

"I hope so," Belle said, and in that moment two twinkling stars were set in the pitch of her eyes. She was a vision, even in plain clothes and with a smudge of dust high behind her left cheekbone. In the face of her it was impossible to feel loathing; she was the dam that held those cold waters back, a sharp demarcation between what was present and what had come before. "If this is an interrogation, you can tell me if you feel up to skipping the rest of the afternoon." She leaned over the counter until their noses were nearly touched.

He sighed. "Alas, this afternoon I have an appointment I must keep. But perhaps this evening...?"

"Done," Belle said. "I should probably get back to work anyway. I've been contacting some of the community leaders for help, and I'm waiting for them to call me back."

"Scintillating."

"You have no bloody idea," she said, and then as quickly as she'd come she was gone, slipping out through the back with only a brief farewell.

-

He kept his appointment—left with a souvenir, even, which was better than he could've wished—and spent the rest of the time until closing working on a personal project, the repair of a little volume of verse that he thought Belle would like. When he finished, he slipped two or three pressed rose petals between the pages, wrapped the book in paper, and locked up.

He found Belle in the kitchen of her flat; he could hear her singing as he clambered his way up the stairs and let himself inside, where she was orchestrating meal preparation. Three pots were bubbling away on the stove, and a fourth was near to boiling over—the chef was humming to herself and stirring a bowl of dough absently as she read the Mallory propped up against the egg carton. Rumpelstiltskin pressed a kiss to her cheek and reached over her to turn down the burner.

"Oh!" she said. "Thanks. Sorry, got distracted."

"Always with your nose in a book."

"But there's so many stories I haven't read here!"

Rumpelstiltskin grinned crookedly at her as he shed his coat. "And so few in the other world, dearie. Anything I can do to help?"

"Here," she said, and shoved her mixing bowl into his hands. "Add the wet ingredients next, then it's onto the cookie sheet and into the oven. Did I preheat the oven?" She blew at a tendril of hair that had escaped its bindings and was stuck to the sweat on her forehead. 

Rumpelstiltskin finished with the cookies in short order and retired to her window seat to watch her in her domain. She was, at best, a haphazard cook, with a tendency to wander off in thought and forget her dishes entirely; at her request he'd once enchanted a sand-timer to chirp every five minutes, or every three if you turned it on its side. Nevertheless, she rarely produced any meal that tasted less than delicious. She was best with breads and greenery. Her meat tended to be a little charred, but was often so savory that he didn't mind the black bits.

Rumpelstiltskin himself was an indifferent chef who lacked not skill but simply will. He could and had survived on mash or porridge for years, and for one decade had forgone food entirely. Belle's enthusiasm for eating was infectious, though, and he never left her table dissatisfied.

With the meal, that was.

After dinner he washed the dishes while she laid a fire in the grate, and then he presented her with his gift. She thanked him long and ardently on the hearth, and again in her too-narrow bed. If Oneiros visited Rumpelstiltskin that night he retained no memory of it, although he hadn't slept untroubled since he'd traded a piece of his soul for revelation some forty years before. Belle, for her part, seemed untroubled by her own night terrors.

The next day was ruined, as his days so often were, by Sheriff Swan's dulcet tones at the door.

"Iz! Iz, are you in there?" There was a pause during which Emma presumably considered the early hour and good manners, and then the shouting resumed. "Iz, sorry to wake you up, but you didn't answer your phone and I have got to talk to someone!"

Belle burrowed against his chest and groaned.

"Can I get rid of her?" he rumbled.

Belle's hand emerged from beneath the tangle of blankets, groped across his face, and, after locating his mouth, slapped across it. "Nnng," she said.

"Certain of that, love?"

"New rule: No terrorizing my friends before noon." She levered herself upright, rubbing at her eyes, and after a jaw-cracking yawn stumbled out of bed and into her slippers and robe. "You wait here, I'll see what she wants."

Rumpelstiltskin had already rolled into the warm spot she'd vacated and was halfway descended to sleep. Her hand combed through his hair, and then he heard a click as she opened her bedroom door and shut it again. He drifted to the patter of voices, to the rise and fall of Belle's voice and the far less important cadence of Emma Swan's. He'd left his manuscript copy of Basil Valentine's _Triumphant Chariot of Antimony_ strewn across the kitchen table, which might prove a problem if Miss Swan chose to question Belle about her choice in bedpartner—but no, she was unlikely to interpret that as anything other than one more of Belle's esoteric interests.

Some time later, Belle cracked the door and came to sit on the side of the bed.

"That was Emma—"

"I gathered," he muttered into his pillow.

"She's beside herself," Belle said. "I've never seen her upset like this before, but it affects Henry and—and the rest of the town. Rumpelstiltskin, I need you to promise me that you didn't have anything to do with this."

At her distress, he'd abandoned all desire to sleep, and now he put one arm on his drawn knee and reached out to cup the side of her neck, nudging her to look a him with a thumb under the corner of her jaw. "To do with what?"

She sucked in a breath and shuddered all over; in that moment she reminded him of some high-strung wild thing as likely to bite as to flee. "Regina's gone."

"Vanished, you mean? Or run away?"

"Emma doesn't know, but Henry's hysterical. Rumpelstiltskin—"

"I swear to you," he said, "I have no direct hand in her disappearance."

Belle jerked away from him, and he had to steel himself against flinching in response. "No 'direct' hand? How am I meant to take that?"

"Sweetheart—"

"No," she said. "You don't get to call me that now, not until you answer my question."

Rumpelstiltskin's heart was a dusty, tired thing, too small to start with, long overtaxed, and now beating only with a sluggish, reptilian pulse, but even so he felt a web of ice close over it. "Why—" he managed.

"Because I can't think when you call me pet names."

"Ah," he said, and finally let his outstretched hand drop. "Then, Belle, I will tell you that I did not harm the Queen, nor did I cause another to harm her. It's possible that one of my...contingency plans took on a life of its own and played into this."

"But you didn't intend to harm her?"

He laughed shrilly and without humor. "Intent is meaningless." At her sharp look, he added, "If you're taking intent into account, then no, my only intent was to keep my promise to you. I won't feign grief if someone's removed her from the playing field, but this wasn't my doing."

"...I believe you," Belle said. "I believe you. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have..."

"I've given you reason enough to distrust me in the past, dear." When she didn't protest the endearment, he continued. "I'm not a wise man, but I don't think I could knowingly do something that would drive you out. When you left, I started to drink. When Regina told me you'd—" He choked. "When she told me you were dead, I...lost much of myself. Despair is one thing, but under this curse of mine it becomes something else, something very..."

"You're alive," Belle said. "You're here. You're taking responsibility for what you do."

"I wasn't sane."

She leaned into him and pressed her forehead to his, closing the distance she had moments ago needed. "That's the real dark side of all this, isn't it? True love is supposed to be like breathing, something easy and beautiful, but when it's threatened...when she—the Queen—when I was her prisoner, she did things to me, things that made me not-so-sane myself. I broke nearly all the bones in my hands clawing at the doors. Trying to get back to you."

Rumpelstiltskin made a hurt noise and caught her hands, soothing them between his own.

"When everything is taken from you," she added, looking down at the tangle of their fingers, "you only have the strength to hold on to what is closest to your heart."

"I don't wonder why I have no wisdom of my own," Rumpelstiltskin said. "You've quite clearly taken my share."

"Flatterer."

"And now we have another dilemma. If your Emma isn't looking for me now, she will soon. Hush, love, you won't be the only one to reach that conclusion. It's hardly a secret that I have a rivalry with the Mayor."

"She isn't my Emma," Belle said, looking cross, although at him or the situation he wasn't sure. "What should we do?"

"Tell her nothing," he said.

"Tell her everything," she countered. "She'll trust me—"

"Not when she sees this. She's not going to be building statues in my honor any time this century."

"We'll take that bridge when it comes," Belle said, but in a way that he knew meant that he'd failed to convince her of anything. She was a headstrong creature, his Beauty. "You'll convince her far more easily if you don't make her hunt you down."

Rumpelstiltskin sighed. "Yes, very well, I can see there'll be no changing your mind. Let me decide what to tell her, at least?"

"All right."

"Do we have time enough for breakfast before you drag me to jail?"

"Shower first," Belle said. "And don't forget to shave. Nobody will believe you're innocent if you turn up looking like the town reprobate."

"I've never actually forgotten to shave," he muttered, "and I _am_ the town reprobate," but he followed her down the hall to the bathroom anyway.

They showered separately in the interest of avoiding distractions. Rumpelstiltskin let his mind slip down the paths of possibility as he soaped his hair; Regina might have simply taken off of her own will, brought low by the Savior's reappearance or her son's increasing hostility. More likely was that some third party with a grudge had interfered. He would've suspected Jefferson if the man hadn't been on Gold's payroll—the Hatter was a wildcard, and even generous compensation and the loyalty of long acquaintance wouldn't keep him in check if he decided to gun for the Queen.

Not even for Belle could he feign upset that Regina was cleared from the field. She'd shown talent and a surprising shrewdness, but she was by far the most self-absorbed soul Rumpelstiltskin had encountered in his long life. She liked to fancy herself a visionary, a crafter on the grand scale, but her ambitions were ultimately the products of vanity and a handful of misconceptions she refused to relinquish. Her mother—now there had been a sorceress with vision. Not a vision Rumpelstiltskin could respect, but Cora could play the long game as few others could. Maleficent was capable, but she'd lost what little interest she'd had long before the matter with the briar roses. 

There were enough trace remnants that had carried over from the old world that some magical mishap might have befallen the Mayor. Perhaps she'd fallen through a portal. Or—he amused himself with the thought—perhaps she was closed in her own vault beneath the cemetery. A more fitting tomb he could not imagine.

He was threading his cufflinks through his sleeves while Belle puttered in the kitchen when the knock came.

"That'll be the Sheriff," he said.

Belle sighed. "She doesn't waste time. Hang on, can you finish this? It just needs to be browned on the other side."

"I'll manage. Go."

She went, and although he at first made an effort to concentrate on cooking, Belle's quarters were small and the Sheriff's voice carried.

"—know he's here! Mrs. Crewe saw you come in together last night."

"I never said he wasn't here," Belle said.

"So what, now you're trying to hide him?"

"Emma, don't. We were going to come down to your office this morning. I know that you're angry as a friend that I kept this from you, but right now you're acting in a professional capacity—"

"Damn—dang it, I have a right to be angry! Why didn't you say anything? I knew something was up with the two of you, but I can't believe you're sleeping with him!"

"It's new," Belle said. "And _private_."

"He's a bastard. If he's taking advantage of you—"

"He's my partner."

" _Partner?_ How the hell did you even meet? Three weeks ago you were asking me for the name of a lawyer and now you're shacking up together?"

"Not yet," Belle said.

"Belle..."

"Emma, you're just going to have to accept this. He's in my life. I'd be happy to discuss it in detail with you later, but right now you need to focus on your job."

"Yeah. Yeah, okay. We'll talk about it soon?"

"I promise."

Rumpelstiltskin flipped the bread; he assumed they were hugging. 

"Jesus," the Sheriff said. "God, this is a mess. Henry called me early this morning saying she hadn't come home, and it turns out nobody's seen her all day yesterday."

"Is there a forty-eight hour rule?"

"Screw that. She's gone, we all know she's gone, and much as I dislike Regina I can't believe she'd just disappear on Henry like that."

"How is he?"

"Not great. He's all tangled up about her anyway, but this is almost more than he can handle. Poor kid."

"I'll stop by to see him later today. He's with Mary Margaret?"

"Yeah, she's taking a sick day to keep an eye on him. Sorry, Iz, but I gotta ask...where were you yesterday?"

"At work," Belle said. "I can give you a list of witnesses if it'll help."

"No, that's fine. Was Gold with you?"

"We met after work and were...together...the whole night."

The Sheriff heaved a sigh so momentous it could've borne a flying carpet across oceans. "He's in the back?"

"The kitchen."

"...He's been eavesdropping this whole time, hasn't he?"

"Probably," Belle said, unrepentant. 

The Sheriff stomped her way into Belle's cozy little domain. "You," she said, addressing Rumpelstiltskin. "Don't think you're getting away with this."

"Getting away with what, dearie?" He transferred the toast to a plate and slid four pieces of bacon onto the griddle to warm. 

"You—Iz—you know what I mean. Where were you yesterday?"

"Here," he said. "At my shop. French toast?"

"What?"

"Would you like some food?" he repeated. "Ms. French insists that I be cordial to her acquaintances, and I believe a shared meal is a customary sign of courtesy."

"You _cook?_ "

"Stop it, both of you," Belle said, stealing his spatula and pushing him away from the stove. "Emma, do you want three slices of bacon or four?"

"Four," the Sheriff said.

"Good," Belle said. "Now set the table. We'll all feel much better about the day if we start with something to eat."

The Sheriff eyed him balefully as she helped herself to the carton of orange juice. Rumpelstiltskin ignored her and swept up his papers from the night before; they'd intermingled with one of Belle's professional journals and a few of her handwritten notes. A shopping list, he discovered, and another page of ideas for her upcoming hearing with the City Council, and a reminder for her next therapy session.

"You're almost out of orange juice, Iz," the Sheriff said. Rumpelstiltskin noted that one of the glasses held a much poorer share than the others; his suspicion was confirmed when the Sheriff slammed that glass down in front of him. He looked at her over the top of his notes on chrysopoeia and then returned to reading, making it clear she was beneath _his_ notice.

"Emma," Belle said.

"What!"

"Give him his juice."

"Fine," Emma said, and dumped half her glass into his.

Rumpelstiltskin flashed his teeth at her. "Thank you, dearie," he said, and drained the glass to the dregs. Belle rolled her eyes skyward, but she surely couldn't be surprised; she knew that he didn't mix with the Sheriff—didn't mix with other people at all. The best Rumpelstiltskin could hope for was to be left alone. Barring that, he saw no reason to be _nice_.

They all survived the breakfast by dint of Belle's determination and his and the Sheriff's sheer affection for their hostess. Emma bolted her meal and left directly after finishing, but she made him swear up and down that he'd stay in town and make himself available should circumstances prove such measures necessary. He and Belle washed up and then armored themselves for the day; he handed her the canvas rucksack she carried to work and she handed him his briefcase and then, together, they left.

-

His garden languished. Only a few ambitious stalwarts continued to bloom this late in the year; Maine's climate was harsh, similar enough to the land where he'd been born that Rumpelstiltskin felt comfortable loathing the winters. Roses weren't the only plant he cultivated—there were herbs, and the trees and shrubs for privacy—but they were the garden's purpose and reason for being. They were a small continuity, too, something he'd carried through all the lives he'd led. His first had been a raggedy, wild thing that grew beside his mother's hut, and despite careful tending, even its thorns had come closer to the mark of beauty than its blossoms.

He'd already prepared the beds for the first frost, but Belle's return had distracted him from the dozen minor wants a garden had, even in hibernation. Unfortunately, he also had to harvest the rest of the rue he'd need and dry it. The fresh was better for making spells or breaking them, but dried rue would do in a bind. He had half a dozen components yet to gather, and the earliest the job could be finished was the end of the month, and that provided Jefferson kept his end of their most recent bargain.

His project kept him busy enough to dodge the hounds that snapped at his heels for a few more precious days. The Sheriff was caught up in her son and her investigation; Regina was gone, and not a whiff of her cloying perfume lingered to give sign of her continued existence. Maybe she'd been murdered and dumped in the bay. It could be done, although the murderer would have to take care that the body didn't wash up on shore.

Belle caught him in the workshop one night as he hung the bundles of rue from the rafters, a room he could show to no one unless he wanted to provide proof of sorcery beyond all reasonable doubt. This land was without magic, completely absent of the glimmering threads of enchantment that sank in the rocks and rivers and earth in the old world, but there were still artifacts that retained some of their old properties—and while Storybrooke was without magic, it wasn't without the _knowledge_ of magic; there were grimoires here aplenty.

"What are you doing hidden away down here?" she asked.

He took his time climbing down the stepladder, careful of his leg in that mindless way of long custom. "Experimenting," he said. "A bit of this, a bit of that. Looking for a lesson?"

"I thought you said magic didn't exist here."

"It doesn't, hasn't for a while, but that doesn't mean it might not again. The boundaries between worlds are thin, at least in places like this."

"You're planning something, aren't you," she said, and drifted over to stand beneath the rue. Her blouse was blue, a faded imitation of the color of her eyes, and in brown boots and a brown skirt she almost looked like she'd stepped out of the great hall in his old castle, ready to do the washing or fetch him a new sheaf of straw. "Look at this—this place is a mess. It's a wonder you haven't tripped over the clutter and broken your neck."

"I'm not so easy to kill, dearie, even without my scales."

"What's in this box?" 

"Clock parts," Rumpelstiltskin said. The sight of her here, nosing through his stock as she prowled from his workbench to the glassware bubbling over bunsen burners to the spinning wheel in the corner—she kept getting distracted by the bookcases, and so it took four circuits of the room before she'd examined everything to her satisfaction—set the territorial beast in his gut dumb with contentedness. 

"Why the rue?"

"Useful to have on hand," he explained. "It breaks spells, if you know the way to use it. I have a little bottled and stored away."

"I've missed the smell. You always used to smell like rue, and rosemary..." She reached a hand up to the hanging bundle and stopped short of touching it. "Is it better here? Have you ever thought of staying?"

"I hadn't. There's...not been cause for me to consider life after I discovered Bae's fate."

"Do you like it better here?"

"Do you?"

She took another turn around the room as she thought, head tilting automatically to the right any time she neared a bookshelf—the better to read the spines. "No," she finally said. "I don't think so. Maybe if I'd been born here it would be different, but Storybrooke is dishonest. I'd rather go home, to the castle, or even back to wandering the roads. This town makes the back of my neck itch."

"I don't either," he confided. 

"You miss your potions," she said. "Oh, don't look at me like that, this room proves it. You probably hate having people bother you all the time, and not being able to shut yourself away from everyone, and having to search for things instead of just summoning them to you. I do like the idea of a lending library, though. And the educational system is interesting. Not perfect, but interesting."

"And now I fear that when we return, you'll be running university classes in my dungeons."

"I wouldn't do that that you," Belle said. "I'd have Snow or Charming build me a campus and then I'd ask you to enchant me a door that takes me there every morning and brings me home every night."

"We think highly of our influence, do we?"

"Maybe not with Snow or her husband," Belle said. "Why the clocks?"

"An idle thought." He poked through the box, letting the springs and cogs wash through his fingers. "It's almost impossible to capture the tick from a clock, dearie, but that's no excuse not to try."

"The tick from a clock?"

"Oh yes. There's an old story to go with it, about a watchmaker and the princess she loved. No happy endings there."

"Tell me?" Belle said.

"Later," he promised. "If you keep the Sheriff waiting, she'll grind my entrails up and feed them to that garish machine of hers to make it run."

"Her car isn't—"

He raised his eyebrows.

"It is rather...bright, isn't it. Well, at least she has the police car, too." She kissed him thoroughly and then left for her dinner date. Rumpelstiltskin tinkered in his shop until dark; he felt suspended when he was gone, as if she'd taken his animating force with him and left only mechanical flesh behind to live by rote until she returned. It was a different kind of waiting, and required a different kind of patience to endure, than the long years he'd worked for the casting of the Curse.

Confident that Sheriff Swan would occupy Belle's time until late, at dusk he laid aside his work and retired to his bedroom with Belle's chipped cup, a bottle of sleeping pills, a pad of paper, and a pen. He used the latter two to write a note to Belle to be opened if he didn't return—the waters he was about to enter were known, but no less dangerous for the knowing—folded it, and tucked it under his pillow. It was short; he wasn't a poet, but she deserved to know how he felt and what had become of him. He risked his life more carefully now that he'd found her alive, but he still had a promise to keep.

He put the cup on the nightstand, close enough that he didn't have to extend his arm to brush his fingers against it, and only barely resisted lingering over it. Some of the china pattern had started to wear away through long handling. There'd been many nights when he'd turned it over and over in his hands, using it as a totem to awaken memories of better times. It had been precious, but was far less precious than the woman who'd damaged it, and couldn't come close to matching the value of what he bartered for tonight.

Preparations complete, he took two sleeping pills and waiting for sleep to come—

—and woke dreaming.

His hands were the first thing he noticed, the shadowy tint that showed green in some light and gray in others and gold when the sun fell on it, and the black claws that never broke but had often tangled with his spinning until he'd mastered the trick of their use. He was back in his old crocodile-skin coat, with the high boots that hadn't been fashionable in Mr. Gold's world for centuries; when he looked past his feet he saw only the pitch of utter emptiness, until he concentrated and the ground formed and spread outward like a spill of oil paint.

When he looked up, he was standing on the shore of a vast ocean. No gulls called on these shores, nor white sails marred this horizon. Behind him was a gate, sunk into the sand and carved of horn. He could turn, and go back through the gate, if he so chose. He did not.

"If you're here, I'd talk with you," he said.

Nobody responded; Rumpelstiltskin had expected as little, and with a shrug he put one foot onto the ocean and then the other, and so began walking across the water.

He walked until his feet should have bled, but he'd long since mastered the trick of this sort of travel. Time moved strangely in dreams, and the body had only as little or as much meaning as the dreamer gave it. If he wanted, he could blink and be on solid land, but then he'd simply have to walk just as far over sand or rock or grass. Overhead the sky turned crimson; far to the east, he could see stormclouds of ash gathering.

He walked until he could no longer see the horn gate behind him, and then until he could no longer see the shore, and on until the ground dropped away underneath the water and the sea was fathomless in the truest sense of the world; old beasts dwelled here, monsters who remembered the dawn of the universe, alongside other, more personal demons. He could see them below the surface, if he cared to look—here the butcher he'd turned into a pig, there the knight he'd turned into a flower. Here his wife, there his son, and his son, and his son again. And, always, Belle, trapped, drowning, beating her fists until the water stole her breath and her face went the milky, clammy white of a corpse.

He kept his eyes fixed ahead, not looking where he trod, and let himself turn to stone. It was easy, being stone. Not so easy on the ocean, but he knew the trick. He knew all the tricks.

When he reached the other shore, there was someone waiting.

"Hey," the crow said. "I don't know what you think you're doing, but this is probably a pretty crappy idea. He's not really in the mood for visitors."

"He'll see me, dearie," Rumpelstiltskin said. "We made a deal, a long time ago."

"Yeah, he's not really big on that," the crow said. "But whatever, it's your skin. Watch your back, Spinner." It flew away without disturbing the air, a neat bit of imagination. If he watched closely, Rumpelstiltskin could see that it didn't flap its wings at all.

The shoreline sloped upward at an impossible angle; he traversed it in three strides and stood at the crest of the hill to look out at the wasteland. Beyond the waste, lining the pit between the jagged mountains, was his castle, and opposite it Regina's toothy monstrosity, and beyond those the unmistakable silhouette of Mount Atalanta, where he'd fought the wizard Merlin in a battle that lasted three days and three nights. No one had ventured to that mountain in decades; strange ghasts lived in its shadows, and the nights were as cold as the wind that blew between worlds.

Rumpelstiltskin's fourth step carried him into a memory—

_The night was dark, the clouds so overcast that they bleated out the light of the full moon, and he could not see his hand if he stretched it in front of his face. He tripped often. The roar of anguish from his knee ebbed to numbness and then washed over him fresh again with every step; if he could only stop for a moment—sit down for a sip of water and a few moments' rest—he could sit down now and slip away, and who would notice or care if a coward died a coward's death..._

_In the dark he didn't see the ravine, and the crooked stick he'd repurposed as a walking stave hit short of the edge as he felt for the ground. He fell, and in the dream he didn't get up—_

—and his fifth carried him out of it. Although he'd walked upright, with no trace of a limp in his gait, for the past thousand miles, he felt a bolt of pain in his leg now, and he heard the wet crack of a club hitting bone.

He kept walking. After another league, during which he'd thought about nothing at all, he came to a well, and beside the well a sword. He turned the crank on the well and pulled up the bucket; the water inside was clear and cool. He let the bucket fall back without attempting to control its descent. There was no splash when it hit the bottom, if it hit at all.

The sword he studied. It was well-crafted, with a filigree on the cross-guard and a hilt bound in the softest leather. It was also sturdy, made not for decoration but for a bloodier purpose, and although it was the standard length for a sword of its type the hilt was, to his eye, sized for a smaller hand. When he picked the sword up it rang in his head, and he was on a battlefield—

 _A bright soldier with yellow hair at the front of her army, and before her a witch with a terrible army of her own_ —

He set the sword down. It was meant for another; he'd never been one for swords; but he could carry the sword's name until it was needed.

He walked on.

He passed other scenes, other memories, other speculations, but after the sword he stopped for nothing. At last he reached the edge of the wasteland; at the foot of the mountain was a great wooden table, long enough to sit a dozen, but only one chair was pulled to it. Before the chair were three cards: to the left, the Hanged Man; to the right, the Wheel of Fortune; and in the center, the Magician, reversed.

"That's a little on the nose, don't you think?" said Rumpelstiltskin.

"Perhaps," said the being who appeared in the chair. "Perhaps they wouldn't be, if you were less hard-minded. What brings you to my realm, Rumpelstiltskin?"

"Oh, dearie, the usual," Rumpelstiltskin said, and tittered. The noise was less jubilant than nervous. "I've come to make a deal."

The man spread his hands, and between them spun galaxies. "We've made a deal before. It did not, I think, turn out to your liking."

"But it was what I needed nonetheless," Rumpelstiltskin countered, and fashioned himself a chair of his own. It was not so grand a chair as his old one, the one where Morpheus now sat, but Rumpelstiltskin had learned a little since their last meeting.

Morpheus was as striking a figure as ever, as he was and would be eternally; his face was skeletal, both in the gauntness of his features and the bone color of his skin. His hair was black, and wild, and his eyes were two pinpricks of starlight in the darkness.

Carefully, from out of his pocket, Rumpelstiltskin withdrew Belle's teacup. He set it on the table, and steepled his fingers, and waited for the Dream-King to speak.

"There are few who would approach me a second time," Morpheus said. "Fewer still, who carry such fear."

Rumpelstiltskin barked another laugh. "What more can you do to me?" he said. "You've already driven me mad once."

"I did not drive you mad. You asked for prophecy, and I gave it to you. All that followed was of your own making."

"Yes, all right, you've made your point. I like your sisters much better, you know."

"You're more familiar with my sisters," Morpheus said. "That...is not the same. Nevertheless, you carry my mark, and I am obligated to hear you speak."

"You have a pouch of sand. I have need of that sand."

"And you offer in return...?"

Rumpelstiltskin pointed his still-steepled forefingers at the cup. "That. It's a small thing, but precious to me."

Morpheus unfurled one arm and reached for the teacup; the white of the china was still not nearly as pale as his hand. "What need have I of a trinket?"

"You can have another memory, if that's what you're wanting," Rumpelstiltskin said. "I doubt it'll help you understand any more than the last, but it's a price I'm willing to pay."

"Hn." The Dream-King looked into the cup and then set it down again. "Keep that," he said. "The one who touched it did a favor for me, once."

"And the sand?"

Morpheus withdrew a cloth pouch from his sleeve; he opened it and reached inside. "I will give you three grains," he said. "Consider it a...gift. A reparation, if you will. I am working on making reparations."

A familiar sentiment, Rumpelstiltskin was able to think, although most of his cognitive processes were busy whirring away at the ramifications of Morpheus giving him aid freely. He held out his hand, outstretched and open, at a gesture, and then Morpheus dropped the grains into his palm.

"You shall, I think, wake up soon," said Dream. "Farewell, Rumpelstiltskin. Spend my gift wisely."

"I...thank you," he said, and then someone was shaking him—

" _Wake up!_ Rumpelstiltskin!"

Belle was running her hands over his face, his hair, plucking ineffectually at his shirt before bracing herself against the floor again and shaking him hard enough that his teeth rattled in his head. She raised her hand and looked to be on the verge of slapping him when she recognized his eyes were open.

He rolled up on one arm and hacked to clear the cobwebs from his throat. "Something...something the matter, dearie?"

"Oh!" Belle said. "You're awake."

"So I am."

"I'm sorry, I saw the sleeping pills and I lost my head a bit—what's that?"

He'd opened his palm to reveal three grains of sand, visible in the dim light only because they flickered with a faint luminescence of their own. "Just sand," he said, and, carefully, brushed the grains into the teacup sitting beside the bed. "Hadn't meant to scare you."

Belle laughed, but her eyes were rimmed with red and her chin had developed a visible quiver. "No, I'm sorry, it's fine, I—sorry."

"Come here, love," he said, threaded his hand under the thick fall of her hair, and drew her down beside him. "You have no reason to apologize. I had an errand to run, and I thought the pills might speed the way."

"Funny sort of errand," Belle said.

"Oh, that's one way to put it." He toyed with the fine hairs at the nape of her neck before combing his way up to her crown; she relaxed into him and hitched her knee up to rest on his thigh. She was dressed in her pajamas already, which meant that she'd been tiptoeing between the bathroom and the dresser when she caught sight of the pill bottle. Unfortunately, the drugs hadn't had the time to work their way out of his system, and he was on the verge of drifting back to sleep. Belle seemed content to curl up beside him and let his hands soothe her, though. With a bit of work he managed to free the blankets and pull them up around her shoulders.

"Did you set the alarm?" she muttered against his neck.

"Never fear, the blasted thing is armed. I miss living a life where I could sleep as much or as little as I chose for however long I liked."

"Lazybones," she said, and then she must've drifted off herself; her breathing deepened, and with one last sigh her body went limp.

Rumpelstiltskin followed her shortly thereafter. His dreams were quiet for the rest of the night.

-

"Emma wants to question you," Belle said.

They were at the library; he was sitting on a yellow plastic chair sized for someone a great deal shorter in the leg—and that was saying much; Rumpelstiltskin was not a tall man—while she sprawled on a rag rug with her guitar and a sheaf of music. The doors were locked. It was late enough after hours to satisfy even Belle's criteria for closing time, and he'd stopped to pick up up in the Cadillac and somehow gotten roped into playing audience as she plotted her next singalong.

"Emma knows how to reach me," he countered. "That's a morbid choice for a group of children, don't you think?"

She grinned impishly at him and, strumming her guitar, sang, " _What do you leave to your true love, my handsome young man?_ "

"Something better than hell and fire, I hope," he said. "She deserves some compensation for suffering a love who is neither young nor handsome."

"Young enough and handsome enough for me," Belle said, and winked at him. She was in rare spirits today. "I wouldn't poison you, either."

"No?"

"Oh no. I'd be much more creative than that."

She startled a laugh out of him. "You would at that, dearie. Beautifully as you play, I think you'll have better luck with Mother Goose than Lord Randall. No need to give Storybrooke's citizens another reason to run you out of town with pitchforks."

She picked out another, livelier melody. "Will you talk to her? For me? She thinks you might know something she doesn't."

"What I know that Miss Swan doesn't could more than fill a book," Rumpelstiltskin said, "but yes, for you I'll go. Has she had any success?"

"None. Five days and it's like the Mayor just...vanished. Fell through a crack in the floor. I'm taking a turn with Henry tomorrow; he's been going to school but Mary Margaret has a prior obligation this weekend and Emma isn't about to let Sidney Glass watch him."

"See that she doesn't," he advised. "Mr. Glass shares his mistress's moral fiber but none of her backbone."

"Who was he?"

"A genii, and after that a mirror."

Her fingers stilled and the music died away as realization crept up on her. "Mirrors?"

"Nasty things," he said. "Not a favorite of mine, as you can imagine.

"God. I can't believe that she—she can't use that trick here, can she?"

"No. Although," he couldn't resist adding, "if she can, we've given her quite the show."

"That's why you wouldn't believe me..." she said to herself.

He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. "It was more paranoia. That friend I mentioned—she'd recently turned on me. In retrospect, for entirely sound reasons, but it was one betrayal piled on top of too many. And there was always the possibility that Regina might discover how long I'd been guiding her fate. She's clever. Blind, poor lass, but clever."

"You manipulated her," Belle said, a shadow passing over her expressive face.

"I offered a means to an end. She would've sought the same end whether I interfered or not, and what's the harm in turning that blackness to my own purpose?"

"You needed someone to cast the Curse," she said. She set her guitar aside, drew her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them. Speaking of clever women: she'd have all his secrets if he gave her the barest evidence and a few minutes to work through the circumstances with logic. "You couldn't do it yourself because..."

"The Curse required the sacrifice of whatever the caster loved most." He indulged himself, letting his head hang down so his hair shaded his eyes. "Regina cut out her father's heart."

Belle recoiled. "Her own _father_? Was he evil?"

"No more than most fathers, and considerably less than some."

"And you...had nothing left to sacrifice."

"Well, I couldn't very well cut out my own heart. That would defeat the purpose, and unfortunately spellwork of that depth requires payment before services are rendered. Regina played her part nicely."

Belle, his brave lioness, tried and failed to hide a shudder. "She's as much a victim as any of us in her own way, isn't she?"

"Her mother and her marriage were hard to her," Rumpelstiltskin acknowledged. "Maybe harder than she could bear, although her choices belong to her."

"You're right, it doesn't make her any less horrible," she said, "but it's hard not to feel for her, just a little."

"People are rarely evil all the way through. Not even Regina."

"Not even you," Belle said.

"That's a nice sentiment, dearie." He laughed dryly. "However untrue, it's a nice sentiment."

"You aren't evil, but you are a stubborn bastard. I swear, if I told you the rain was wet you'd take the opposite opinion just to be contrary."

"I wouldn't!"

"Oh, you would and you know it. Come here." She opened her arms and waited, patiently, while he maneuvered himself to the ground and stretched out his bad leg. She guided his head into her lap and started to stroke his hair as he so often did hers. Rumpelstiltskin tried and utterly failed to keep up an affront.

"We could do this more comfortably in a bed," he grumbled. "Or in front of the fire at home."

"Yes," Belle said, "I can tell how unhappy you are."

"I'm too old to roll around on a rug with stuffed toys. It's not dignified."

"Dignity is such a concern of yours. I can't imagine why all heads of state don't wear leather pants."

"The ground smells like cereal."

"They like to grind fruit loops into everything." She bent forward, her hair slipping over her shoulders and falling over their faces like a curtain. "Any other complaints?"

"None," he breathed, and then she captured his mouth. "Although," he added, after she'd pulled away, "the florescent lights in here are rather hard on the eyes—"

"Shut it," Belle said. "If you don't like the lights, you'll have to replace them yourself."

"Really?" 

"...No! No, absolutely not. You aren't coming in here and tearing my library apart only to avoid straining your eyes." She bit her lip and turned her head sideways to look at the ruin of a bookcase that held the juvenile paperbacks, and then repeated, " _Absolutely_ not."

She'd thought about it, though. With Belle, that was victory enough.

The next day he kept his promise and made his way to the sheriff's office. Emma was waiting for him, which meant that Belle had already talked to her—warned her, more likely. He'd find their friendship grating and likely would've resented the Sheriff's imposition on Belle's time if the camaraderie didn't bring Belle such obvious pleasure. It was good she had friends; their current happy union wouldn't last, he knew, happiness never did, but he took comfort in knowing that she wouldn't be alone in the world.

"Gold," Emma said, not offering him the courtesy of a nod. "Be with you in just a minute."

"Take your time, it isn't as if I have anywhere else to be," he said. That earned him a glare; perhaps he'd better avoid an attempt to poke through her filing cabinets while he waited. Instead, he took a seat in front of her desk and watched her. Being watched unnerved people, although Miss Swan handled it better than most; being watched by him tended to drive them to panic. The Sheriff darted glances at him a handful of times but otherwise kept her concentration on her paperwork.

"Done," she said. "Look, I know you don't want to be here, but Iz says you're innocent and, god only knows why, I trust her judgment—"

"Very wise of you," he commented, for once without irony.

"I—yeah. Wow, you actually care about her, don't you? That is just...completely bizarre. I think I might be _relating_ to you."

"It won't last."

"Hope not," she said. She leaned back in her chair and looked close to propping her feet on her desk, the picture of insouciant authority. "I respect that you make Belle happy—I don't _understand_ it, as much as she's tried to explain it, I just respect it—but don't kid yourself for a minute. You're still a snake, and I don't trust you."

"Pity," he said. "I was hoping we might give joint Christmas gifts this year, too."

She leveled her pen at him. "Don't go there, buddy. You're here for business."

Rumpelstiltskin raised his eyebrows and settled his hands atop his cane, as innocent as—well, not very innocent, but presenting a reasonable facsimile. The Sheriff groaned.

"Yeah, okay, I get it. Look, do you know where Regina went or not?"

"No."

"No? Just no? That's it?"

"I have plenty of suspicions, Sheriff—the Mayor was good at making people angry—but no, I've absolutely no idea where she is now, and I played no part in her disappearance. Is there anything else?" If she really trusted Belle's word, simple interrogation wouldn't have been her motivation for bringing him here.

There was, of course, her little trick with the truth-telling, but even she had to know there were ways around that.

"Can't believe I'm doing this, but yeah, there is. You have your fingers in a lot of pies in this town, so I was wondering if you could make...inquiries. See if anyone knows anything." She dropped the pen and ground her teeth. "I have nothing. No signs of struggle, no evidence, no suspects, no ransom note, not even a drop of blood. It's like she just magically disappeared."

"Ah," said Rumpelstiltskin. "Is it, now."

"If you turn up anything useful, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt when it comes to Iz, cut you some slack."

"Are you proposing a truce, Sheriff Swan?"

"I'm proposing the possibility of a truce, _if_ you're helpful and don't go around beating the crap out of your girlfriends' fathers. Jesus."

"I'm willing to help, but there's a price."

"Of course there is."

"I want access to the Mayor's home and offices." His fingers tightened in an allowable expression of eagerness. "The scene of the crime, as it were."

"You'll have to have an escort."

"That's no matter to me."

"Then done."

"Pleasure doing business with you," he said, rising, and then, on a whim, stretched out his hand. Emma stared at it, but after a moment to digest her shock she reached out and shook it.

"Henry likes you," she said. "And Belle likes you. I don't trust you, but this is your chance to change that."

Another lioness, this one. He'd have a whole pack of them at his heels if Belle kept collecting friends. 

"You'll be hearing from me," he said, neutrally. "Best of luck with your investigation, Sheriff."

"Thanks. I think," Emma said.

His second errand of the day proved the most rewarding. The Hatter was waiting for him by the docks, dressed in a shabby coat and shoes worn down at the heels and with a box wrapped in brown paper at his feet. He was watching his daughter play; she was at the shoreline, breaking off bits of bread and tossing them into the water, presumably for the gullst. The man was a devoted father, and Rumpelstiltskin respected that.

"You have it?" he said, coming to a halt beside Jefferson and bracing his cane on the ground.

"Oh, I have it. It'll cost you a pretty penny—burned through the last of my you-know-what getting to it—but it's whole. More power to you, if you use it to do what I think you're going to do. Or what you've done, I should say. Good riddance to bad rubbish. If you tell me where you dumped the body, I have a dance saved for her grave."

"You continue to astonish me with your lack of lucidity."

"I'm lucid! I'm perfectly lucid. When the wind is southerly, at least."

"Then let's hope it doesn't blow from the north-northwest soon. I'll continue to rely on your discretion as matters come to a head."

"Sirrah," Jefferson said, affecting a haughty voice Rumpelstiltskin had heard him use to take the piss out of more than one king, "provided your compensation is as generous in the future as it has been the in the past, I will wrestle the northern winds my bare fists if you so desire."

"Good."

They stood together in silence for a time, watching Grace laugh as she flung crumbs to the fish. More bread blew back to her hair than made it to the ocean, but she seemed delighted by the game all the same. Every few tosses she turned around and checked for her father.

"Does she remember you?" Rumpelstiltskin asked.

"Not...what I was," Jefferson said. "She knows I'm her father, knows I was forced to give her up and that I came back for her. That's enough."

"Is it?"

"More than. More than I deserve, definitely. And, ah, touching as this is..."

Rumpelstiltskin produced an envelope from the inner pocket of his coat. "Your payment."

Jefferson opened the envelope and rifled through the contents, checking, no doubt, that Gold had held to his word. He was one of the few who didn't take Rumpelstiltskin's promises at face value. "All here. Pleasure doing business with you. Well, I say pleasure..."

Rumpelstiltskin stooped and collected his parcel; it was small enough to tuck under one arm, although the whole thing was bound with so much twine that it shed fibers on his suit. The Hatter's version of thorough looked like obsession to more sedate eyes. 

"I'll be in touch," Rumpelstiltskin said.

"Sure you will. Take care of that lady of yours."

"The same to you," he returned, and, that appointment finished, he set out for his last stop of the day. This was was twice as distasteful as any other; if there were any justice in the world, he'd have turned the whole lot of them into rats and fed them to the clockmaker's cat long ago. Alas, the Mother Superior was a force in her own right—not as powerful as the Dark One, perhaps, but possessed of a certain talent and a certain knowledge that was as yet beyond him. The Fair Folk, under whatever guise, were thieves and liars, put in the world only to steal away children and the addle-minded.

The Mother Superior was waiting for him, a manila envelope clutched in her folded hands as she stood primly before the convent door. She hadn't brought the silly one—Astrid, that was it—with her this time, and thank god, too.

"Mr. Gold," she said. "I have your rent." She offered him the envelope, and he took it and rifled through the contents much as Jefferson had done earlier.

"And neither a day late or a dollar short. Well done," he said, softly.

Even here, where he knew with a fair amount of confidence that she didn't remember anything of his past or hers, she looked at him with an air of...contempt. Contempt, and more than that, the patronizing, willful blindness of a woman who was sure she was in the right and that the poor, little people around her should be pitied for their wrongheadedness. He hated her. 

"Is there something else?"

She smoothed down the front of her skirt. "Yes. Yes, there is. We're planning a candlelit service for Katherine Nolan—"

"Ah ah ah, but the terms of your lease clearly state no public gatherings after dark."

"Which is why we were hoping you would offer us dispensation for this one time only. A special allowance, for the good of the community."

Rumpelstiltskin mulled request over as he recounted her rent—he didn't often accept cash payments for a sum this size, but at least she'd paid on time and in full—and tucked it away. "I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll make you a deal."

"Our Lord doesn't bargain for charity, Mr. Gold."

"He may not, but I do. You visit the spiritually impoverished, yes? Go visit Ms. Blanchard. Bring her some soup. Tell her...tell her that you're praying for her. You do that, and I'll let you have your little gathering." He leaned a little closer, so she could take in the relish with which he trapped her. "Free of charge, even."

The Mother Superior gave a prissy harumph and, quite literally, turned up her nose. "I'll discuss your offer with my sisters."

"No matter to me. I'll be visiting Miss Blanchard, though. If she reports on your good deeds, well..." He spread his hands and left the offer hanging.

Her lids fell to half-mast and behind her eyes burned like hot coals; he was tempted to check his shoes to make sure they weren't sizzling. "Your choice. Until next month."

He drove home the long way, via the route that avoided the center of town and instead skirted the shoreline before looping around the outskirts and to the northeastern quarter where he lived. The sun had just dipped below the horizon when he pulled up and parked, but his home shone with a cheery light and from some open window he heard a sweet voice singing along to the radio. He stowed Jefferson's delivery in the basement first and then made his way to the garden. Despite the cool evening, it was the back door rather than a window that she had open; she'd supplemented the electric lighting with candles from the sitting room, and the radio she'd discovered who-knows-where had been out-of-date long before Henry had been born. She had it tuned to play big bang music, and the station crackled over its layers of trumpet and trombone and saxophone. Rumpelstiltskin propped one shoulder again the doorframe. He could watch her forever.

"Oh, damn!" 

"Seasoning your food with eggshells again?" he asked.

She looked up, startled, at the sound of his voice, and without hesitation a smile blossomed on her face. "I can never figure out the trick of it, but I'm able to fish them out, at least! Well, usually."

"Here," he said, and left his coat, suit jacket, and cane at the table. "Move aside, it's my turn to cook for you. No, no arguments. You manage to talk me out of it far too often."

"Fine," she said, "but you have to take care of the eggshells." She hopped up on the counter and crossed her ankles; the height afforded him a magnificent view of her legs, and he took a moment to savor it and the expression on her face—which said both that she knew he was looking, and that she liked it. When his gaze finally travelled up the length of her body to her face, he saw that she was flushed, her cheeks painted a rosy color in the warm light, but she didn't try to hide her appreciation.

"Someone I think I'll manage," Rumpelstiltskin said.

From the looks of it she'd started with cornbread, which didn't exactly go with any main dish that could be assembled with the contents in the refrigerator but didn't exactly _not_ go, either. He used a teaspoon to chase the bits of shell to the side of the bowl and then drag them up to the rim. "Spatula," he said, and she handed it to him.

"Busy day?"

"Not terribly. I went to see your sheriff, though. She seemed less interested in questioning me and more interested in finding out what I can do for her."

Belle gathered her hair at the nap of her neck and bound it back. "What _can_ you do for her?"

"Surely you realize that I am a veritable font of information," he said, pulling a face so flamboyant that she snickered.

"You're a font of something, all right. She wants you to help her?"

He measured out a cup of milk and poured it into the mix; as usual, she'd added the ingredients all out of order. "She wouldn't have asked if she weren't desperate, but desperate she is. I agreed to pass along any leads in return for access to the Mayor's home and office. Which will, no doubt, prove as empty of evidence as the Sheriff assures me they are."

"You don't seem at all concerned about the Mayor," Belle said.

"Neither do you, dearie."

"I'm more relieved than anything," she admitted. "I hate that I feel that way, especially about Henry's mother, but I do. It's a relief not to have to see her around town and wonder if she's going to lock me away again."

Rumpelstiltskin dropped the measuring cup in the sink and, holding the edge of the countertop for support, went to stand before her. "I'm sorry," he said.

"For...for what she did? That wasn't your fault. You can't blame yourself—"

"I can. I do. You may have drawn her ire on your own merit, but that doesn't change that I brought you to her attention, that I—that I threw you out. She wanted you as a bargaining chip to use against me, and for that I must apologize."

Belle studied him, and although at times like this it shamed him to meet her eyes, he did.

"I accept your apology," she finally said. "And I forgive you. Now, that's done. No more dwelling on it. For either of us."

"It's that easy?"

"It should be," she said, and caught his hand to press a kiss to his palm. "Now go make me dinner."

"As my lady commands," Rumpelstiltskin said, and swept into a half bow that managed to approach elegance despite his leg and long years of disuse.

Belle laughed and tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. He kissed her for that, and then popped the cornbread in the oven to bake while he rummaged for the parts of a more rounded course. He did make a point of setting the butter dish beside Belle on the counter to soften.

"I spent most of the afternoon going over my employment contract again," she admitted. "The internet was absolutely no help."

"The laws here are cobbled together from the old world, the new, and whatever strange whims take the ruling citizens on any given day. I have all the memories of going to law school and three lifetimes of negotiating magical contracts besides, and even I have trouble deciphering the town charter."

"Fired for mental incompetence," Belle said. "If it comes to that, who would hire me? I would hate to leave the library, but I need some way to support myself."

"You can come live with me and fold my socks," Rumpelstiltskin jested. 

"I think I've had enough of being a kept woman for three lifetimes myself. Ugh, Regina." She crossed her arms and shuddered. "Besides, you fold more neatly than I do."

"There is a simple solution," he said.

"Oh?"

"I could give you the library."

Belle jerked upright, startled. "What, you mean you own it?"

"The building belongs to me," he said. "The fixtures, also. The books I donated to the city as a tax write-off."

"How many books do you have?" she said, wondering. "The workshop and the basement here are packed, and the library is..."

"The library's collection has grown since then. You bought most of the additions yourself."

"And the city owns those, too."

Belle bit her lip, her habit when she was thinking furiously. Rumpelstiltskin let her be and attended to chopping vegetables. The radio cycled through a series of ads and then began a new run of songs, starting with a high, sweet clarinet melody over the more raucous lower horns. He could give her the library—hand it over lock and key, sign the deed to her name, or even rent the place to her, and if she were new to Storybrooke still, with nothing to her name, he knew she'd accept. She had, however, worked hard for her life, and when she had means of her own wouldn't allow herself to take it from him. 

"No," she said, as he knew she would. "Thank you—thank you very much—but I think I need to fight this battle and win it on their terms."

"Then so you shall," Rumpelstiltskin said. The timer went off; he took the cornbread from the oven, setting it on the stove within arm's length of Belle and fetching a small plate and a knife to leave beside it, before returning to the salad's preparation. As soon as he turned away, he caught out of the corner of his eye her hand darting out to test the temperature. She pulled away, burned—although, he reassured himself, not painfully so—but by the time he'd finished the salad and was putting the broccoli on to steam, she was cutting herself a thick slice of bread and buttering it on both sides.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing, dearie. It's only—"

"Yes?"

"I love you," he said, and—unaccustomed as he was to saying it, undeserving as he was of her strength and tenderness—he meant it. With all that he was, and all that he had ever been, meager though that sum might be.

"I'm glad, because I adore you." She looked down, awkward, but smiled. "Might be inconvenient otherwise."

"We couldn't very well have that."

"No, we couldn't."

He stood there, aware that they looked like a pair of grinning fools and unwilling to make the slightest move to stop. After some time, he became aware of a noise, like the hissing of steam.

"Belle?" he said.

"Yes, Rumpel?"

"I think that pot's boiling over—" and he rushed forward to take it off the stove before the heat scaled the bottom of the pot.

"I think you're right," Belle said, and poked another piece of cornbread in her mouth.

With a little imagination he still managed to produce an edible meal—admittedly, getting Belle to eat anything wasn't much of a struggle—and when she finally set down her fork, it was with an air of satisfaction.

"I guess it's my turn to wash up," she said.

He propped his elbows on the table and laced his fingers together. "Leave it," he said.

"Oh, we shouldn't—that's so unhygienic—and the back door's still open, too."

"I'll wash up in the morning."

"You'll have to chisel the plates clean—Rumpelstiltskin!" He'd circled the table to pull out her chair, and now tugged on her hands until she stood up. "What are we doing?"

"Dancing."

" _Why_ are we dancing?" 

"Why not?" he said, and twirled her out. She threw herself into it, her skirt fanning out around her legs, and whirled back to him almost too enthusiastically.

"You just like this song," she accused.

Rumpelstiltskin smirked at her, unable the deny it, although very shortly their dancing turned into revolving, and revolving into swaying as she tucked her head beneath his chin—as neat a fit as if they'd been built around each other.

_In a spin, I'm loving that spin I'm in,  
I'm under that old black magic called love..._

-

Regina's living space was positively sterile, save for the rooms inhabited primarily by her son, and the decor managed to be colder than the woman herself. Rumpelstiltskin stood in her foyer, let his eyes fall shut, and inhaled; years of work with delicate concoctions had honed his sense of smell to inhuman heights. Here he caught sandalwood, the sticky-sweet smell of apples, the chemical overtones of the polish used on the floor, and a middle note of wood smoke that had drifted through the open door—from the bonfire in town.

"What, are you just going to stand there and sniff?" The Sheriff muscled her way around him and dropped to her haunches to study a set of scuff marks on the door.

"Does that offend you?"

"Not any more than you generally offend me by existing." She rubbed at one of the marks with her thumb. "Yeah, this is nothing. Henry never walks when he can run—probably made these when she had him all dressed up for school pictures. What are you looking for, anyway?"

"Something unusual," he answered. "Her study is through here?"

"What," Emma said, "you haven't been here before?"

"Once, long ago, to make a...delivery. The Mayor isn't forthcoming with invitations to her personal sanctuary." He pushed the door open with his cane and took in the shelves, the picture of a horse handing over the mantel, the elaborate fireplace—so heavy it evoked intimidation rather than warmth—and, everywhere, the apple motif. Really. She was tiringly predictable, his old apprentice.

"So what's Belle up to these days?"

He ran a knuckle over the spines of a row of books, looking for anything unusual, but nothing was out of place here; the titles were the usual, classic works selected to impress guests rather than anything more practical. "You would know that as well as I, dear."

The Sheriff snorted. "Yeah, right. You're hogging her all the time. It's nice to know that I come third behind a building of moldy old books and a...well, you."

"Flattery will get you nowhere, Miss Swan."

"Are you always such a sarcastic ass? Is that what she sees in you? No, really, I want to know."

He was tempted to make a lewd remark and withheld it only with effort. "Nothing in here. She sleeps upstairs?"

"Hell if I know," Emma said, but, curiously, she'd blushed all the same. The Sheriff turned red with embarrassment only rarely—outrage was far more likely to draw a heightened state from her and put a bloom in her cheeks. "This is your show. I'm just here to make sure you don't steal the silver."

"Please," he said. "While Regina's taste has a commendable...cohesiveness, I'm unlikely to run off with a fork that's sharpened at both ends and poisoned in the middle."

The bedroom was as empty of traces as the rest of the house, although in the cupboard next to her bed he did find something interesting—his copy of _Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra_ that had long gone missing from the back room of his shop. 

"Oh, hey hey hey, no. You can't take her stuff, Gold. I was joking about the stealing."

"It isn't stealing if I'm taking what's rightfully mine," he said. He hefted the book more securely under his arm and started down the stairs. "This book went missing from my store a number of years ago, Sheriff. In fact, if you search the station records, you'll find I reported the theft. All the paperwork's in order."

Muttering under her breath, the Sheriff trotted behind him. "You know what, fine. I have bigger things to worry about. So what, that's it? You're taking your book and leaving?"

"We still have her office to visit," he said, letting himself into the passenger side of the Sheriff's car. "Don't tell me you're pining for my company already?"

"As if," she said, fastened her seatbelt, and threw the car into drive. 

He paged through his recovered book while she drove—safe enough, since there was little chance Emma would recognize the language it was written in, much less be able to read it. He'd bought a copy shortly after Storybrooke's creation for pure entertainment value. Cleopatra the Alchemist could teach little of the art that Rumpelstiltskin hadn't read or divined himself, but she knew more than most of the ancients of this miserable place. For a period in the eighties he'd devoted a year or two to tracking the history of magical study in his new world. After much frustrating conjecture, he still hadn't been able to determine if this reality had once had magic, and lost it, or if it had been created whole and devoid of sorcery all together. He was more inclined to believe that what magic there was was simply inaccessible to human will—there was always magic in the trees, in the oceans, and in the stars—but the existence of lore didn't imply the existence of sorcery. Stories fell through the cracks between worlds. His own, for instance, as fractured as it was.

He took a wicked pleasure in going through Regina's filing cabinets. Sidney Glass hovered outside the office, twitching anxiously the whole time, but Rumpelstiltskin ignored him and the Sheriff's heavy, put-upon sighs. On his second circuit of the room an irregularity in the pattern on the wallpaper caught his attention; if he hadn't known what to look for it would've escaped notice all together, minor mark as it was against the black-on-white forest print of the walls. When he bent to examine it, he found a series of interlinking circles no larger in total than his fingernail.

"What?" Emma said.

"Nothing," he said. "Except—" He drew back the heavy curtains that bracketed the wide window and found there, on the ground, what he only hoped he'd find: Regina's keys. Most were the usual brass-and-nickel kind, keys for her car and front door and so on, but one was a thick, old-fashioned piece made for a heavier lock.

"How'd I miss that? How'd the _forensics_ team miss that? And," the Sheriff added, "why the hell didn't she have her keys on her? Did she drop them? There's no other evidence she struggled."

"She didn't," Rumpelstiltskin said. 

"What does it mean?"

"That, Sheriff Swan, is for your department to find out. Although if you'd like some help, you should consider lending me her keyring when it comes back from the lab." The laboratory report would show nothing, of course, other than Regina's fingerprints, but the heavy key was made of cold iron. No magical reserve in Storybrooke was deep enough for what craft had been worked here. 

"Lotta help you are. Hey," Emma said. "Hey, how'd you know to look for that, anyway?"

"You"—he laid a finger alongside his temple and then threw it forward to point at her—"aren't suspicious enough. Didn't anyone tell you that a little paranoia is healthy, Sheriff?"

She pinned him with a hard look, but he shouldered it as easily as he'd shouldered a thousand darker burdens. "Don't play games with me, Gold."

"I would never," he said, softly. "Good day, Sheriff."

"Wait—I drove you here."

"I'll walk," he said, and turned, and left, the book still under his arm.

The Sheriff's voice followed him out: "You mentioned Regina was here planning a community event the night she disappeared."

"She was," Glass replied. "The Mayor is devoted to supporting each and every one of Storybrooke's citizens in their times of need."

"Yeah. So what was the event?"

Rumpelstiltskin halted just inside the door to hear Glass's answer. "A candlelight service," Glass said. "For Katherine Nolan."

"Why would Katherine need a service?"

Glass's clothing rustled as he shifted. "Her husband cheated on her and threatened her, Sheriff. The Mayor thought her dear friend deserved a show of compassion from the town."

"A show of compassion?" Emma said, leaning hard on the second word. "The Mayor was big on shows."

"She was big in everything she did," Glass said, and then Rumpelstiltskin had to leave, before Glass started gushing about Regina's pretty doe eyes and the graceful way she gutted men.

Belle found him that evening in the basement, staring at the alembic as the solution inside bubble away softly. He was turning the spinning wheel idly while he thought, but it was the still that held his attention; with the essence of rue distilled and the addition of Jefferson's little gift, he was lacking only a few key pieces—and the proper date. For this sort of thing it was wise to pay attention to the movement of the heavens. It was no coincidence that Regina had disappeared on a new moon.

Belle's voice drifted down the stairs. "What are you doing down there?"

He stilled the wheel and turned off the burner. "Nothing to fret over, dearie," he said, as first her feet, then her legs, and finally the rest of her came into view. "Just gathering a little eye of newt for my collection."

"You told me once that the only magicians who used eye of newt were hedge-wizards, and third-rate ones at that," Belle said.

"And did I ever say I wasn't a third-rate hedge-wizard?" 

"I can't imagine you've ever been a third-rate anything," Belle said, and if that wasn't proof she saw him through love's eyes, he didn't know what was. "Even when you're being horrible, you're very good at it."

"Thank you. I think." 

She started poking through the mess, careful not to touch anything raw but not otherwise restraining herself, and he would've taken pleasure in her ease if it hadn't sent a sharp thrill of fear through him at what she might find. To distract her, he pulled Cleopatra's book across the table and flipped it open. The Byzantine Greek was close enough to a language in their own land that he suspect she'd be able to decipher at least some of it; she hadn't had as many years to pick up languages as he had, but she had a better ear for it. 

The sketches caught her eye first, and she braced herself against his shoulder as she leaned forward to better study the pages in the dim lighting.

"Not originally a codex?"

"A reproduction. The manuscript was written two millennia ago, by a woman named Cleopatra. Not the famous one."

"And this?" She put her finger on a sketch.

"The ouroboros," he said.

"I've seen it before." Her forehead creased. "Regina had it etched in the door of my cell in her castle. There were other symbols, too..."

"Shoddy work," Rumpelstiltskin said. "It's a glyph of purification, among other things."

"You're trying to find out why this world has no magic, aren't you?"

"Oh," he said, and grimaced in the direction of the alembic. "Tinkering, mostly."

"Bottling fame, brewing glory, and stoppering death?" At his slanted eyebrows, she added, "It's from a children's book. Nevermind."

"I already bottled glory, and stoppering death is no challenge when one is already immortal." He stood and nudged her in the direction of the rack that held the fine concoctions, the ones he'd created himself and wouldn't dare let fall into the hands of anyone else. "As for fame, why bother?"

"You'd rather have notoriety?" Belle teased.

"Infamy, maybe." He took the bottled sun and held up up to the window; it looked like nothing more than a fistful of dried weeds, but it had taken him three decades to harvest and preserve those weeds in such a way that they would last. "There has to be an equivalency—a price—and if you distill and bottle the spell, you can offset some of the cost."

"By paying it beforehand."

"Yeah. Although how you use the spell determines the cost, too—only the sort of enchantment that changes fates demands a price on a karmic scale. If I summon a cup of tea instead of walking upstairs to fetch it myself, the cost is only the equivalence of the energy I would expend in the first place. Easily enough paid by depleting my own reserves or burning an offering or in a thousand other ways."

"What if you create the cup instead of summoning it?"

"Then you'll need an appropriate material for the transmutation."

"Glass?" she said. "Or, what, china? A plate?"

"If you're a hedge-wizard, maybe. Air or a few motes of dust will do."

"But a few motes of dust don't contain enough matter—"

"That's science, dear," he said. "This is magic."

"It isn't logical."

"Certainly not."

"I don't like it," she decided.

"Somehow I'm not surprised," he said, dryly, for which Belle smacked him the the ribcage.

They retired early that evening, curling in bed with their books and an extra quilt even though he'd told Belle too many times that she could turn up the heat as high as she liked. Belle finished reviewing her statement for the hundredth time; it needed, in his opinion, no revisions, although he'd seen Schwarzwald from the City Council eyeing Belle with a predator's stare when they passed in the streets. She was a cold one, more reptilian even than he, and it had surprised him that she'd consented to work with Regina after he sister's demise until he realized she had little affection for family and much for bloodshed. One time he had seen her sew a cocoon of spider-eggs beneath the flesh of a man's stomach, and after she'd stitched his skin back she'd forced her thumb into his mouth and cut out his tongue. Rumpelstiltskin hadn't stayed around to watch what happened when the spiders hatched.

He fell asleep between one page and the next, and was jerked back awake by hoarse screams.

"Belle!" Neither of them had turned out of the bedside lamps, and in the puddle of light she was thrashing; the sheets were twisted around her legs and she was sobbing.

"Belle," he said again, and caught her hands before she could bash them against the headboard. "Belle! Sweetheart, you have to wake up, it's only a dream—"

He could tell when she came to by the way her body froze; he released her and backed away as quickly as he could manage, so that she wouldn't wake up fully with a man looming over her. "Shh, dearest, you're safe, you're fine, you were having a nightmare..."

"Rumpelstiltskin?"

"Right here."

"Oh god," she said, and then she threw herself at him, burying her face against the side of his throat and clutching at his shoulders. When she whimpered, it cracked what was left of his black heart.

Awake, she cried silently, which had to be a remnant of her time locked away—where any noise drew attention, and all attention brought pain. Her tears were hot against his skin, though, and the breaths she heaved strangely reassuring. He held her and petted her hair and reminded her, again and again, that he was there, that she was safe, that she would never be imprisoned again or his life be on it; and after a long time her gasps for air grew less desperate. When she lifted her face away, her eyes were swollen and her nose was dripping, but the desolation behind her gaze stayed any attempt he might have made at levity.

It did not, however, stay her. "You have snot all over your shirt," Belle said, and made a watery attempt at a smile.

"It's fashionable this season," he said, completely serious.

"And in your hair," she added, and sniffled.

"All the rage, I hear."

"It's probably in mine, too."

"You're beautiful," he told her, aware that he had the thought too often and let her hear it too little. "Would you like to..."

"Talk about it? Not really. Just...another nightmare." She shifted her weight off his lap, for which his leg was grateful, and sat back on her heels. "Sorry," she said. "Sorry, I—I'm going to go wash my face, and then...maybe we could turn out the lights?"

"I'll be here," he promised, and when she darted to the en suite took the opportunity to change out of his shirt and mop his neck; he was, indeed, covered in snot. 

She didn't close the door—she rarely did—and he heard the tap running while he switched off the lamps and relocated the box of tissues to her nightstand. When she returned he patted the mattress invitingly, and they curled around each other again. Her bare limbs were cold from her brief stint in the chilly air. 

Often, she found it easier to talk in the dark. It was a trait they had in common.

"It wasn't just a dream," Belle said. "It was more like a memory. She wanted something from me, and she sent in this person...I never saw their face, they would..." Her fingers tightened on his shirtfront, and he pressed a kiss to her hair. She seemed to draw strength from that, but it was another moment before she could bring herself to speak again, and during that time Rumpelstiltskin thought about being tormented by a man whose face you couldn't see. He began to consider the most fitting—the most terrible—the most unimaginable punishments his unique experience could inflict.

And then he caught himself, and drew away from that line of thought before it consumed him entirely. She had shared with him a little of her sessions with Hopper; the man had diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder, and Rumpelstiltskin knew—as he knew the cowlick at the back of his son's head, as he knew the shape of Belle's eyes, as he knew without looking how to avoid the thorns of a rosebush—he knew that Belle had to hunt her demons herself. He risked losing her, if he took up that battle for her.

She would hate him. It was a miracle that she didn't, but also the one thing he couldn't bear.

"They hurt me," she said, her voice hardly above a whisper. "I couldn't see their face, but they hurt me. Sometimes they wanted information, about Avonlea or troops movements or what I'd heard or—or about you—but more often they just...wanted me to hurt."

"They can't hurt you here," Rumpelstiltskin said.

"But you can't promise that they'll never hurt me again, can you? They're still out there, even if they aren't here now."

He pulled away from her and sat up, forcing her to look at him in the dim light. "D'you know what you'll do, if they capture you again?"

She stared and reached a trembling hand up to his face. "No."

"You'll endure," he said. "You bear it, as you bore it once before. You will hold on and you will tell them what they need to know and you will—you _will_ stay alive, because you are the strongest, most resilient, more resourceful person I have met. You will do this, and you will know that I will come for you."

"And if you don't come for me?"

"I would be dead," he told her, baldly. "I didn't come for you the last time, and that is one mistake I could not stand to make again."

"And"—her voice hitched—"if you're dead?"

"They you'll free yourself," he said, grim future though it was. "I may have convinced the Hatter to open your door, but you stepped through it on your own. That was you, love."

"If you die, I'll call you back from the grave and kill you again myself, and then you'll have to haunt me."

"There's a happy thought," he said, and then the gravity of the moment eclipsed itself and they both smiled, although Rumpelstiltskin knew his eyelashes were damp and suspected Belle's were, also, although it was impossible to tell in the shadows of the waxing moon.

-

October was fast drawing to a close, and as Halloween approached the library ate up more of Belle's time as she stuck cutouts of ghosts and ghoulies to the walls and hoarded candy for the Chamber of Commerce's parking lot trick-or-treat. He closed the shop early one day and walked the few blocks between them, the wind kicking up dead leaves 'round his feet the whole way. He'd hoped to find her unoccupied, although as she settled into her role more and more of Storybrooke's population had taken to dropping by, but when he arrived he found her once more occupied with decorating; this time she was winding orange tinsel up the bookcases in the far back of the non-fiction section.

"Bored?" Belle asked.

"Excuse me?"

"Are you bored? You don't normally wander over to see me this early unless you are."

"Maybe I wanted to take out a book."

"Help yourself," she said. "We have plenty."

"Maybe," he said, "I want the librarian to _find_ me a book."

She stopped plastering tape to the underside of a shelf and regarded him from the great height of her step-ladder. "Rumpelstiltskin, you can entertain yourself for five minutes while I finish this. Go on. You can flirt with me later."

He grumbled under with breath but did as she asked, removing himself to the circulation desk. He briefly considered poking through the patron records to see who had checked out what—there was much that could be extrapolated from a person's reading habits—but then realized that the wall opposite was both unattended and out of Belle's line of sight. He crossed to it, checked again that she was busy, and slid the panel upward to reveal an elevator hidden behind.

He bared his teeth in frustration at the noise. "What was that?" Belle called.

"Nothing, dearie," he said, and ran his hands over the controls as swiftly as he could take them in. This was a problem; what had possessed Regina to require a two-person operation of the elevator he didn't know, but at that moment he could've gutted her for her oversight. If the Sheriff had pulled her useless head out of her arse he might've gained her assistance, but as matters stood, there was only two others he could recruit, and Jefferson might very well suffer an attack of conscience while Rumpelstiltskin was below and leave his benefactor down there to rot. There was, really, only one choice.

He closed the thing back up and slid the mirrored relief of the tree into place seconds before the clack of Belle's heels drew uncomfortably close. "What was that sound?" she asked.

He tapped the head of his cane against the old card catalog. "Trying to see if I could shift these. They're a bit out of date, aren't they?"

"They have character," Belle said. "Anyway, they're interesting, even if we don't use them anymore. For a minute there, I could've sworn..."

"What, dear?"

She shook her head. "Nothing. Sometimes I think I can hear...roaring...coming through the pipes, but that's ridiculous."

"Overactive imagination," he advised. "You might want to have a doctor take a look at that."

She rolled her eyes and then, snickering all the while, threw a garland around his neck. "There. You're here often enough that I ought to decorate you, too. I could find a stuffed bat to sit on your shoulder. We'll prop you up in the supply closet and you can pop out and scare anyone who tries to dodge their fines."

"I can think of better things to do in the supply closet."

"No," she said. "The last time we tried that I ended up with bruises all up and down my backside."

"Ah, maybe not, then."

"If you help me finish, I could be persuaded to close early this afternoon," she said, hoisting herself onto the counter and tucking her skirt beneath her thighs. 

"Unfortunately, I have some unavoidable business later today. Lunch?"

"I packed sandwiches. Enough to share," Belle said. He offered her a hand and no sooner than she'd finished arranging herself she hopped down, using his grip to steady herself and avoid stumbling on her high shoes.

They had a quiet meal, made better by how disinterested she seemed in finding out exactly what his afternoon business entailed—although, in retrospect, that in itself should have struck him as alarming. Belle was not renowned for her lack of curiosity. 

By the late hour at which Rumpelstiltskin arrived, Jefferson had finished his task; the loft was clean of cobwebs and other debris and the boxes he'd stored there had been cleared away—presumably loaded into the moving van parked across the street, which would ferry them to a storage locker a few minutes west. 

"Afternoon," Jefferson said. "Spot of refreshment? A cup of tea, perhaps, or a bit of mold?"

Rumpelstiltskin winced. "The bathroom was that bad."

"Worse. I expect a lot of money for this. Money, and maybe a cruise trip for Gracie. She wants to go to Disneyworld."

"Yes, well, best of luck with that." Rumpelstiltskin peeled away three more bills from the roll he was holding. 

Jefferson squinted and then rubbed his fingers together. Rumpelstiltskin sighed and handed over the entire roll.

"Excellent. Want me to scrub the toilet again?"

"If the thought excites you, by all means." He walked the perimeter of the room leisurely; there was enough furniture left to make do, although the bed was little more than a cheap frame, and he wasn't about to have his territory invaded just as Belle was finally growing comfortable in his home. 

"I remember when I hired servants to clean for me," the Hatter said, looking mournful as he wiped his hands on a rag so soiled it could only be spreading the dirt around. "I had bespoke clothes and kings offered me their daughters' hands for an hour of my attention."

Rumpelstiltskin knocked the head of his cane against the rafters and was satisfied when no dust was dislodged. "I pay you a queen's ransom every week for mere hours of work, and you want to complain that you're poor?"

"I'm on retainer," Jefferson explained. "It's expensive to keep a man of my stature on retainer. Don't suppose you're back in the gold business again?"

"Not yet," Rumpelstiltskin said. The Hatter, of course, read his implication and smiled, although it was not the lazy smirk he'd once worn.

"Good for you. Although I am obligated to add that if my daughter or I get caught in the crossfire—"

"We have a deal."

"Point taken," Jefferson said. "And to the letter of the law you are nothing if not pious. So..." He ruffled his hair. "Finally met the Sheriff. You've had some dealings with her, haven't you? Has she, mm, mentioned me?"

"I'm leaving now," Rumpelstiltskin said.

"Does she remember my name?" Jefferson called, but Rumpelstiltskin waved him off. There wasn't any hope there; hope was a precious commodity, and he hadn't enough of that or of time to spare to listen to the Hatter collect another infatuation.

-

That night, he dreamed—

He was standing at the top of the steps leading to the basement, and his hands were scarred and calloused but they were his hands, and not the hands of some nightmare creature. The moon hung heavy in the sky, pregnant with potential but not yet full in term; in another day it would turn to the Hunter's Moon, when many things became possible.

He walked down the steps with an even gait and pushed open the door. The workroom was bathed in moonlight that spilled through the ground-level windows and cast silvery shadows on the floor. At his spinning wheel sat a woman; behind her stood another; and cross-legged at the wheel's feet was a third, this one with her chin propped in her hand.

The standing woman crossed to him and, putting her hands on his shoulders to hold him still, looked hard into his face. "Well, my son," she said finally, "you're really fucking this one up."

"Leave him alone," said the woman on the floor; her name, as Rumpelstiltskin knew it, was Nona, and she had in her lap a spindle and distaff of her own. "He's doing the best he can. Which is still pretty bad—sorry, no offense—but you work with what you have."

"Thank you, that's so helpful," said Verdandi, and she dropped her hands from his shoulders. The woman at the wheel cackled wordlessly and spat at Rumpelstiltskin's feet. She'd always had less use for him than the others. "What's the matter, cat got your tongue?" Verdandi added, chucking him under the chin harder than was strictly friendly.

"It has been...a very long time," he said.

"Time's different here," Nona said. 

"Or you are," said Verdandi.

"We're the same. Probably," said Aisa, and then eyed him in a way that made him wonder if she would aim to spit in his face next. She had a pair of shears thrust through her belt as a warrior would wear her sword. "We've brought you a message, moron, not that you'll appreciate it."

"Help us, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're our only hope," Nona said, and wilted under the heavy stares of her sisters. "What? It's a good movie!"

"Moron," Aisa repeated.

"Hush, you two," Verdandi said. "There are things coming beyond even your ability to master, Rumpelstiltskin, and if you falter on your path, it will be because of your hubris and your fear. If you stand firm, you will be set free. The choice is yours."

There was a moment of silence, and then Aisa said, "Well, that's the shittiest prophecy I've ever heard. He'd get more help from a fortune cookie. Listen, idiot, someone's going to offer to teach you. Accept the offer. God knows you need the help."

"Trust your girlfriend, too," Nona said. "She's a smart lady. Just...don't let her make you reckless."

Not to be outdone, Verdandi added, "And watch your back. There are plenty who would hunt you even as you shake the dust of one world from your feet and pass to the next, and if you're going to do what needs to be done, you'll help no one if you get yourself killed for pointless vengeance."

He knew better than to ask—but in this twilight world, thought was action. "Will I find him? Bae?"

Verdandi snatched up the rod she'd left laying on the workbench and cracked him on the knuckles. "Imbecile!" Aisa said, and Nona laughed softly.

"Yes, thank you, that's helpful," he said, cross. 

"You'll find him if you're meant to find him," Verdandi said. 

"You make your fate," said Nona.

"Or we do," said Aisa. "But we don't make _hers_. She roars at us until we get sick of her nattering and leave her alone. Still, we'll get her in the end. We get everyone." She grinned ghoulishly. "We'll even get _you_."

"Stop baiting him," Verdandi said. "Look, you'll figure it out. Or you won't. The wheel's always turning." 

Rumpelstiltskin rubbed at his stinging knuckles and opened his mouth—

And he woke up.

Through the window, he could see the moon. It was almost full.

His heart was beating out a war tattoo in his chest, and he felt sick, not sure if the dream had been nothing his own demons or if it had been something more...portentous. After a length, he drew in a shuddering breath and looked over at Belle; she was still asleep, curled on her side with her hands tucked up underneath her chin. She rarely slept when he couldn't, and he was glad he hadn't woken her. 

When he realized he'd have no luck falling asleep again himself, he padded out of the room as softly as he could—and that was very softly—and closed the door soundlessly behind him. She wouldn't miss him if she didn't know he'd gone, and there were better ways to spend his time than another night of fruitless worry. In the waking world, the moon was still suspended overhead, but his garden was better defined, sweeping as it did from the back patio out to the shadowed woods. Some little creature skittered nearby, disturbing the carpet of dead leaves, and as he passed the dormant brambles of the rose bushes the wind picked up and shook them gently, as if to remind them that they hadn't always slept. 

There was little enough to be done in his workshop; although the impulse that had seized him approached whim, even this had been weeks in the planning. The notion had seized him shortly after Belle's return, when she'd asked him to swear to stay away from Regina, and while he had mourned the loss of opportunity, he had never regretted making the vow. He hadn't thought he could bear the Mayor any real malice, not after she'd proved such a relentlessly useful pawn, but when he realized she'd kept Belle locked away like some sacrifice, to be paraded to the altar when the time was ripe...

Well. As Regina's disappearance proved—he couldn't harm her, but plenty of others could, and had motive and means to enact real harm, perhaps even bitterness enough to send her to her death.

He stayed out back, mindless of the cold, until dawn, and then he went inside to make Belle breakfast.

She liked pancakes best, so he made those first, and then squeezed two glasses of orange juice by hand. The bacon he put on last, because the smell of that would wake her; and sure enough, only moments after the bacon had started to sizzle she appeared, still in her night-dress but with one of his old sweaters pulled over the top and her feet shoved into a pair of slippers that were five sizes too big.

"Ooh," she said, around a jaw-cracking yawn. "Pancakes! What's the occasion?"

"No occasion," he said. "Do we need one?"

She kissed him on the cheek and then stole a piece of bacon straight from the skillet, daring the hot fat and damage to her fingertips. "We should invent one," she said. "That way everyone will know we've at least gone to the effort. Halloween Eve?"

"We were hungry?" he suggested.

Belle popped the bacon in her mouth. "Lazy, but we could make a tradition out of it."

"And now you're talking nonsense, dear. Ah," he said, and swatted her hand away before she could steal another bit of food. "No more risking a burn. Go on, sit down. I'll bring a plate to you."

She tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear and went to the table, where she stared dreamily out the window until he served her her meal. Rumpelstiltskin took his customary seat beside her with a plate of his own, amused when she drowned everything in syrup—breakfast meat, berries, and all.

"Ruby's recommendation," she said. 

"It's a wonder the teeth haven't rotted out of your head." Especially in the absence of small charms that kept such things at bay, although long years ago he hadn't been able to afford even such cheap things for both himself and his son. The dentists here were butchers, in comparison.

"That's what Granny said. She's a sweet woman herself, though. Did you know she offered me a room when I was first released from the hospital? I lived with Father instead, but it was kind of her to take in a stranger, and a crazy one at that."

"I wish you wouldn't—"

"I know," Belle said, and made it up to him by transferring a handful of blueberries from her plate to his. "But if I can't joke about it, I'm afraid I'll never joke again."

He avoided her eyes and speared one of her gifts on the end of his fork; it was dripping syrup. At his grimace, Belle said, "If you don't want it, Rumpel, nobody's forcing you to eat it."

He scowled at her and ate the thing. 

"Honestly," she said, but she said it with a fondness that he could still scarcely believe. It was almost impossible to summon the rage, the delight in pain for pain's sake, the resentment and guilt and loathing that had fueled him for so long, when Belle _existed_ , although sooner rather than later one of those darker currents would slip its noose and lash out, scarring her in the process. 

Rumpelstiltskin finished his fruit and, quite carefully, pushed that thought away, and the subsequent thought about how her hair fell against her neck, and a third that wondered her opinion on the coastline in Maine. He made himself still, inside, like ice, and below that he nurtured the cold flame of his hatred, until he was ready to do what needed to be done.

"What are your plans for today?" he asked.

"Oh, the usual," she said. "Lunch with Emma, if I can drag her away from her desk to eat, and then I thought I might finish putting up the Halloween decorations. We're having a costume contest and story hour for the children tomorrow...and if my next book shipment comes in the mail, I thought I might stay late updating the catalog." A faint anxiety crossed over her face. "If that doesn't interfere with any plans you had."

"No, dearie, that's fine," he said. "Pass along my regards to Sheriff Swan."

"She'll know exactly how insincere you are. It's written all over your face."

"I," he insisted, "am being polite to your friends, which I believe is exactly what you wanted."

Belle laughed at him. She was remarkably consistent about doing that. 

They washed the dishes together and then he packed her off to work, although not before collecting his good-bye kiss at the door, and then, at his leisure, he shaved and showered and set off for the pawn shop. He'd found a packet of playing cards in the shop's basement with strange symbols penciled around the edges, and that would be enough to occupy him until the night's work. Tomorrow he'd send out notices to those of his renters who were habitually late; he could lay siege to that mountain today, but he rather liked the idea of sending them out on Halloween—his own trick.

The monotony of what would have otherwise been a dull day with no customers was broken at half-past three, when the bell above the door chimed to announce the entrance of Henry Mills. He was dressed in his school uniform, and the outline of his knapsack suggested that damnable book. His normally high spirits were depressed well past the point of the usual boyhood moodiness; Rumpelstiltskin had seen the boy angry before, and scared, and resentful, but never had it seemed so appropriate that he was Hopper's most regular visitor.

"Hi, Mr. Gold," Henry said.

"Hello, Henry," Rumpelstiltskin returned. "Here for another gift?"

"No, that's okay. I don't have any extra money, anyway. I spent it all on comics," he said, at Rumpelstiltskin's inquiring look. "But I promised I'd come back to see you, so...here I am."

"So you are."

"My mom's still gone." The boy scuffed his foot against the floorboards, and then looked up, a rare hope dawning on his face. "You don't know where she is, do you?"

"I'm afraid there's nothing I can tell you," Rumpelstiltskin said, truthfully enough. "But—wait here for a moment, would you? There's something with which you can assist me." He stayed long enough to make sure Henry had no plans to leave, and then ducked through the curtain and into the back room. He had to hunt for the magazine box; it was wedged behind a tea chest overflowing with antique drawing compasses, and had on its yellow surface collected enough dust to build a sandcastle. Rumpelstiltskin blew the dirt away and carried his prize out front. Henry was waiting, head down, studying his shoes rather than rummaging through whatever treasures he could reach.

"If you're an aficionado of comic books, perhaps you can help me with this." Rumpelstiltskin opened the box and spilled its contents on the counter. "I'm not sure if these are worth enough to bother selling them."

Henry lit up like a roman candle and launched into an immediate and detailed survey of the small collection, not even noticing when Rumpelstiltskin circled around and nudged an overturned packing crate to the boy's side to boost him up to a more functional height. If the lad was—as Rumpelstiltskin judged—so distraught over _Regina's_ loss, than he was a bleeding heart too prodigious to be staunched, and a bit of distraction would do no harm. When the torrent of words finally slowed to a burble, Rumpelstiltskin picked out the three issues over which Henry had lingered longest and presented them to the boy.

"Your commission," he said. "It's customary to pay an appraiser." 

Henry hesitated. "I guess it's okay, if you're paying me for something you didn't know..."

"I'll expect you to help me again if I find more. Consider this"—Rumpelstiltskin tapped the third comic, a garish piece of literature with a masked man backlit against the night sky, and borrowed Jefferson's term—"a retainer."

"I have a job?" Henry said. "Awesome! Thanks, Mr. Gold. Emma really was wrong about you." He collected his loot and stored it carefully in his backpack; Rumpelstiltskin caught sight of a book bound in brown leather and inlaid with an intricate web of gold before it was obscured by comics. "Should I come back next week?"

"That's up to you," Rumpelstiltskin said. "Although, as I said..."

"You might have work for me. Right." Henry gave a serious, firm nod, and then his determination collapsed into sheepishness. "Um. You don't sell Halloween costumes, do you?"

"Nothing sized for a young prince. Planning on dressing up?"

"Maybe. It didn't seem right, with Mom gone? But...I think she would want me to."

"I suspect she would," Rumpelstiltskin said; there was no doubt in his mind that Regina would rather see her foundling making merry on the witches' feastday than mourning her loss. Twisted and hurtful though it was, there were few who could match Regina's astonishing ability to love. 

The young Mr. Mills thanked him again and bade him farewell, and Rumpelstiltskin returned to his inveterate tinkering. He'd always been one for working with his hands, and even here, without the black mania of the Dark One moving under his skin, he found himself occasionally caught in a fit of restlessness when nothing would soothe him but some fine, repetitive craft or repair. 

He waited until after dark to close his store, taking care to double check all the locks, and then he retreated to the back room. Everything he needed he'd transferred to the shop over the past week; all that remained was to add the grains of sand, a bit of thread, and a pinch of ground chaorite. The rest was in a corked flask, a muddy cloud of sediment that shone red and now silver and now a pale lilac as the angle of his viewing shifted.

When he'd located a suitable flood of moonlight coming in through a rear window, he cleared a space on the sill and set the flask alone in the middle, and then he dropped in the chaorite and the gold thread—his own, of course, brought over with the Curse. Before he added the sand he pulled on his coat and pocketed made sure his keys were near at hand, and then he brushed the three grains from his palm into the narrow mouth of the flask. The mixture within hissed when the first grain hit the surface, and, still hissing, turned an inky black. 

Rumpelstiltskin restored the cork with one hand, braced himself, and removed the bottle from the moonlight. He had less than an hour before the potion would turn to common ash.

It cost him five minutes to travel to the library, which had every window lit even at this late hour. He let himself inside and found Belle sitting on the floor surrounded by the empty carcasses of pumpkins; she didn't stir at he approached, and he saw that she'd caught her tongue between her teeth to aid her concentration as she sawed away. 

"Just a moment..." she said, without glancing at him. "There!"

He said nothing, merely stood, one hand clasping his cane and the other cradling the flask.

"Rumpelstiltskin...?" Belle said.

He shifted his weight and said, "As I recall, dearie, you owe me a favor."

"From—oh!" she said, brushed off her skirts, and stood. She'd abandoned her shoes and now had a pumpkin seed clinging to the toe of one stocking. "I talked to my father, didn't that...?" Written across her face was bewilderment and absolute trust; it was her trust above all that he needed.

"And your father, regrettably, has still not made good on his debts, which means that you owe me a favor," he repeated. "No no, there's no time to explain, but it's a simple enough thing that I have to ask." He waited until she nodded, no less confused but not unwilling, and then he led her to the section of wall into which was set a mirrored tree. The panel slid away to reveal the cogs and gears of a hand-turned elevator; Belle shrank away at the grinding as the door unfolded, but he gripped her by the elbow and forced her to stay.

"Turn the crank here," he said, and set her hand on the controls. "When I call to you—raise it up. Do not try to follow me, do you understand?" She was staring at the elevator, transfixed and not a little afraid, and he shook her to drag her attention back. "Belle. _Do you understand?_ "

She wet her lips. "I—yes, I understand, but...Rumpelstiltskin, what is this about?"

"I've not the time to tell you now, but you'll find out soon enough. I should be...perhaps fifteen minutes." He thought about kissing her, but he found he couldn't take that without her permission, and to save himself from reaching out he stepped into the elevator and slid the cage door shut. "Now, dearie, if you don't mind. Tick-tock."

She started to work the crank, first slowly and then, after the first initial screech of disused gears, with more confidence, and the elevator began to descend. Rumpelstiltskin kept his eyes fixed on Belle's face until it passed out of sight, and then he watched the flask in his hand instead, doing his best not to consider what would meet him at the end of the ride.

When the window of light at the top of the shaft had shrunk enough that he could blot it out with a thumbnail, the beast screamed for the first time, a roar so terrible that the entire world seemed to quake. The inky potion in the flask shook with the trembling of his hands, and Rumpelstiltskin forced himself to be still. There were more ferocious monsters than what waited below; he was one of them.

The mouth of the cavern had been wired for electric lighting, but beyond that the vast space was lit from below by an eerie, phosphorescent glow that seemed to originate in the ravine to Rumpelstiltskin's left, although the light was so diffuse it was impossible to say for sure. He waited just outside the elevator for his eyes to adjust, and then he took four strides into the lair. The bones of small animals crunched beneath his shoes; it had to be a miserable existence, trapped down here for twenty-eight years and forced to hunt rats to survive; he only hoped she retained enough of her human mind to recognize what he was about to do. If he could find her—if she was still alive—

And then what he'd taken for a great slab of rock _moved_ , and yellow eyes opened in the darkness, and Maleficent was there, regarding him.

"Well now, dearie," he said. "You've gotten yourself into quite a bind, haven't you." The enormous head tilted and the yellow eyes blinked, and then her mouth drew open and she let loose a great gout of flame that ruffled his hair but didn't singe him, although he could feel the heat of her fire on his head and hands. He held every part of his body as still as possible; there was nowhere to retreat—she could drive him off the cliff or bash him against the rocks or trap him in the elevator and roast him there, but he was defenseless against her, with no magic and a useless leg besides. She would either eat him, and that would be the ignoble end of the story of Rumpelstiltskin, or she wouldn't.

When she saw that he didn't flee, she snapped her mouth closed and lowered her head, and then, with careful deliberation, the rest of her, until she was resting on the ground with her head between her claws—each of those as large as a man's sword. In the absence of the crackle of her fire, Rumpelstiltskin heard a faint voice screaming his name, and he blocked it out and took a cautious step closer to the dragon instead.

"This may hurt," he warned her, and then he upended the flask over her snout.

He did take cover after that, afraid she would thrash; she roared again, more affronted than angry, and then the roars subsided to snarls, and the snarls to coughing. When he looked again, he found no monster—only a woman, dressed in the shreds of what had been the robe of a sorceress and clutching a gold egg the size of a loaf of bread. She was holding her throat and hacking, and as he brushed gravel from his trousers she spit up a small bone.

"Ugh," she said. "Disgusting. You couldn't have waited for me to digest that?"

"I was unaware you had any objection to eating vermin," Rumpelstiltskin said. "What, no gratitude?"

"Not when you didn't bother me bringing me anything else to wear, and of course you didn't. I could have eaten you. You would've deserved it." She reached into her mouth and picked a bit of fur from her teeth.

"Save it for Regina, dearie. She's the one who trapped you down here."

"With your curse!" Mal said. "You were no better than her, you two-faced sack of shit."

"Ah ah ah, I made no promises. If you trusted me—that was your own choice. And," he added, with the edge of a sneer, "you're yourself again, aren't you?"

"I was myself before," she said, and tapped one long talon of a fingernail against the golden egg. The sound echoed and amplified, spiraling up and up until he wondered if Belle could hear it; they stood balanced on the blade of a knife, and who Maleficent chose as her ally could here and now determine the outcome of this long struggle.

"Hmph," Mal said finally, and held out the egg. "I suppose this is yours."

Rumpelstiltskin took it and tucked it under one arm, and once free of her burden Maleficent drew herself up with all that magnificent swagger and self-possession and swept past him. "The exit's this way? And who in hell is making that infernal racket? I'll have their lungs to make lace for a cloak if she doesn't—"

And at that moment Emma Swan charged into the room, gun drawn; when she caught side of the two of them she drew up short. "Okay, what is going on here?"

"Oh, she's pretty," Mal drawled. "Not too bright, but pretty. What's your name, dear?"

"Mal, stop. Sheriff Swan—" He held up a placating hand. "Mal here was another unfortunate victim of the Mayor's propensity to lock anyone she doesn't like in a dungeon. I trust explanations can wait until we're all in a more comfortable setting?"

Emma holstered her pistol. "Fine," she hissed, "but you scared Iz to death. I swear to god, what am I supposed to do with you?"

"Hah! Such a good question," Mal said, gathering the rags of her skirts and parading between both of them as if she'd traveled the path a thousand times before. 

"I'm serious," the Sheriff said. "She calls me up in a panic, talking about a secret elevator in the library and how it sounds like you're getting torn apart by lions, and that's all you can say?"

Rumpelstiltskin slowed his steps for at least the illusion of privacy. "That's a matter between Ms. French and myself, Sheriff, and it's not your responsibility to interfere."

"You are a piece of work," Emma said, and then she marched after Maleficent. Rumpelstiltskin took a brief moment to ponder the wisdom of simply staying in the pit; it might be safer, and although it was a good deal less comfortable than the life he'd grown used to, he'd had worse before. The egg was heavy under his arm, though, and Belle was waiting, so he turned and followed the procession back to the elevator.

The journey up was less easy but also less nerve-wracking than the journey down. They stood in opposite corners—Mal with one hand on the railing and the other on her hip, Emma with crossed arms and a fierce glare, and Rumpelstiltskin himself with eyes only for the sliver of light and the woman who waited at the top of the shaft—and said nothing. If this was a truce, it was among the more threatening he'd known.

When the cage shuddered to a halt, he avoided Belle's eyes and instead opened the gate, stepping aside to let the Sheriff and Maleficent through first. Emma went to Belle's side immediately, bumping her shoulder against her friend's in a show of solidarity, and Mal surveyed her new surroundings with an imperious gaze. She was a quick study; she'd have the hang of the place soon enough, and start turning Regina's life to hell soon after. Provided, of course, the Mayor ever again showed her face in Storybrooke, and knowing what had happened to her he doubted she would.

"Who's this?" Mal said.

Belle's spine straightened and she took a step forward before Rumpelstiltskin could insert herself into the conversation. "Belle French," she said, and offered Maleficent her hand. "And you are...?"

Mal watched her from behind heavy-lidded eyes, and then, without betraying a flicker of feelings, reached out and put her hand in Belle's. "Maleficent," she said. "A pleasure." She cast sideways for Rumpelstiltskin's reaction, then, and he gave her nothing. "I see. It's like that, is it? Well, good luck, dear. You'll need it."

"Thank you," Belle said firmly. In this whole time, she had not once so much as glanced at him; the sooner he could get her alone the better. 

"I don't understand," Emma said. "The Mayor had you locked up under the _library?_ I need—"

"Mal can give you her statement tomorrow, Sheriff Swan. It's been a trying night for all of us," Rumpelstiltskin interrupted, applying all of his not inconsiderable skill to effect as quick a departure as possible. "What we all need is a good night's rest."

Emma wavered, obviously more concerned for Belle than for the recent escapee, but at the last minute she seemed to remember she was an officer of the law rather than the guard dog. "I'm taking her to the hospital. She can spend the night there, and we'll go through the interview in the morning. If that's okay with you, Mrs.—?

"Mal. _Just_ Mal," Maleficent said, and then gave a rich sigh. "Yes, I suppose that will suffice. Until tomorrow, Rumpel dear. Miss French, as I said: a pleasure."

"You good?" Emma said to Belle.

"Yes. Thank you," Belle said. "Go ahead, I'll catch up with you tomorrow."

"I'll hold you to that," Emma said, and then led Maleficent outside and away. She was fingering her handcuffs as she left; if it came to that, he wasn't sure Mal wouldn't find herself outclassed. Now that they'd gone, though, he could explain to Belle, and if she'd finished with her work, they could go home.

"I need you to leave now," Belle said.

"Dear?" he said, surprised.

"No. I need you to leave," she repeated.

"If this is about—"

"Rumpelstiltskin," Belle said, and then she shook her head and hid her face behind a hand. "You...god. I hate—I hate that I feel grateful that you weren't sneaking around because you killed Regina, but this is—"

"Harmless enough," he said. 

"You made me complicit!" 

"What, you'd rather I have left her down there to rot?" He dropped the egg on the circulation desk. "She was as much a prisoner as you were, _dearie_."

"Don't pretend you had any motive other than to get at Regina without breaking your promise to me!" Belle snapped back. "If that woman is who I think she is—and no, I wouldn't rather have that. I would rather that you tell me what you're doing instead of thinking you have to hide everything from me! I don't need your protection, and I won't have your dishonesty!"

"I—" he started, and then an epiphany ducked under his defenses and hit him upside the jaw. He _had_ been dishonest with her; he'd lied to her and hidden from her, and not for any reason so noble as her protection. He'd done it out of habit. 

"That's what I was afraid of," Belle said. "I can't...I can't have you lying to me, even by omission, or making me part of your schemes."

"Belle, I'm sorry—Belle—" He was veering dangerously close to desperation. "Tell me what to do," he pleaded.

"I need you to leave," she said for a third time. "I can't...I need time to think. Away from you. Just...leave me alone, please. I don't know if I can be with someone who—who uses people so carelessly, and you do."

His mouth was dry. "Yes," he agreed. "Very well."

"Don't try to talk to me. I'll find you when I'm ready."

He let himself have the span of three heartbeats to drink her in; her face was wet, although her chin was firm and her hands clenched into fists at her sides, and her eyes were the high blue of a summer sky.

"If that's what you want," he said.

She shut her eyes; the blue disappeared behind her lids and thick lashes. "It is," she said. 

He nodded—there was nothing else to say—and then he gathered his cane and the gold egg. He wished he'd thought to kiss her earlier.

"Good-bye, Rumpelstiltskin," Belle said.

"Good-bye, sweetheart," he said, and then left while he could still bring himself to do so. He heard her take a step just before he pushed open the door, as if she made to follow him, but he would respect her wishes in this, if nothing else. The door fell shut behind him with a rattle—she needed to have the lock replaced—and then there was only the night before him, and only the full moon for company.

His house was dark and cold and empty. He made his way to the kitchen from memory, without turning on the lights, and found the kitchen table as he had left it that morning, still with the hothouse roses he'd brought home for Belle in their vase at the center.

He sat down and took an orange from the bowl beside the vase, and then he began to peel it, for something to do with his hands.


End file.
